Every civilisation is shaped not merely by the religions it formally professes but also by the customs, memories and practices that its people preserve across generations. Some traditions originate in temples and acquire their authority from scriptures; others emerge from rivers, fields, forests, seasons and the collective experience of ordinary people. They may have no single founder, no universally accepted scripture and no central institution to regulate their observance. Yet they survive, sometimes for centuries, because communities continue to find meaning in them.
Chhath Puja is one such tradition.
Celebrated with particular devotion in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, the Mithila region and the adjoining Terai, Chhath is among the most distinctive religious observances of the Gangetic plains. Its extraordinary feature is not simply that it honours the Sun. It is the manner in which that reverence is expressed: through direct communion with nature, collective discipline, household preparation, regional folk songs, offerings of agricultural produce and a ritual structure in which the devotee, rather than a priest or temple, occupies the centre.
Chhath may be studied not merely as a Hindu festival but as a living expression of India's layered folk civilisation. Its practices invite questions about the relationship between Brahmanical religion, Buddhist cultural landscapes, agrarian societies and communities that have preserved their distinctive customs while participating in a wider religious world.
The purpose of this inquiry is not to claim a single religious ownership of Chhath. It is to explore the historical possibilities that lie beneath its remarkable continuity.
1. The absence of priestly mediation
One of the most striking features of Chhath is the absence of the conventional jajman–purohit relationship and the lack of any indispensable role for priestly mediation in its central rituals. In many established Brahmanical ceremonies, a priest performs or directs the ritual, recites prescribed mantras, interprets scriptural requirements and acts as the intermediary between the worshipper and the deity. Chhath, by contrast, is ordinarily performed directly by the vrati, the person undertaking the vow, often a woman of the household. She observes the fast, prepares the offerings, enters the water and offers arghya to the setting and rising Sun.
There is no indispensable priestly intermediary between the devotee and the object of reverence. The ritual authority rests largely with the household and the community, and its knowledge is transmitted through mothers, grandmothers and other family members.
It has been described as a remarkable form of religious autonomy: the devotee approaches the Sun directly.
2. The language of the people: folk songs in place of liturgical centrality
Chhath is accompanied by an extraordinary body of songs in Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili. These songs are not simply musical decoration. They carry the emotional, ethical and cultural vocabulary of the festival.
They speak of Chhathi Maiya, the Sun, the river, the bamboo basket, seasonal fruits, sugarcane, the family, and the anxieties and hopes of ordinary rural life.
The familiar Bhojpuri song beginning "Kaanch hi baans ke bahangiya, bahangi lachakat jaaye" evokes the bamboo carrying pole and the ritual baskets.
One reading is that the significance lies in the language itself. The central ritual is not dependent upon the recitation of a prescribed sequence of Vedic mantras. It is sustained by vernacular songs and inherited oral knowledge. The dominance of Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili in the lived ritual tradition is unmistakable. The sacred is communicated in the language of the people.
3. A regional tradition rather than a caste-exclusive festival
Chhath is distinctive because its strongest historical and cultural identity is geographical rather than restricted to a single caste.
It belongs particularly to the cultural landscape of Magadha, Mithila, Bhojpur, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining regions. Within these regions, it is observed by people belonging to different caste communities and economic backgrounds.
This is different from a ritual whose identity is closely tied to the hereditary practices of a particular community. Chhath's social reach is generally described as cutting across caste boundaries, even though the experience of caste inequality in the society around it has never disappeared.
Its geographical character is historically visible. Anand A. Yang, in Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar (1999), refers to the sixteenth-century festival calendar associated with Mahesh Thakur of Mithila, which includes Chhath. A Patna-style watercolour in the British Library collection, dated approximately 1795–1800, depicts the festival on the banks of the Ganga at Patna.
4. The absence of a central idol
Another defining feature of Chhath is that its central object of reverence is not an installed idol in a temple.
The devotee faces the visible Sun. The river or water body becomes the ritual setting. The offerings are carried in bamboo baskets, and the worship takes place in open spaces accessible to the community.
There are ritual objects, lamps, earthen figures and other local variations. Some accounts describe clay elephants with lamps, for example. But none of these replaces the Sun as the central object of the principal arghya observance.
The absence of an indispensable temple idol gives Chhath a different ritual orientation. Nature is not merely represented by an image; nature itself is present before the worshipper.
The setting Sun is worshipped, and the following morning the rising Sun receives the offering again. The cycle of departure and return, darkness and light, decline and renewal becomes the central religious experience.
The historical relationship between Chhath and Buddhism has been variously speculated upon and remains contested. Similarity does not prove descent, and the presence of Buddhist institutions in a region does not establish that every local custom originated in Buddhism.
Nevertheless, some observers have suggested that several parallels are sufficiently interesting to merit further historical investigation, though this remains a matter of scholarly debate rather than settled conclusion.
1. The kosi, ritual structures and the symbolism of the stupa
During Chhath, many households construct a kosi, a temporary arrangement made with sugarcane stalks, bamboo and other materials, under which lamps and offerings are placed.
The structure has been said by some to invite comparison with the visual vocabulary of Buddhist stupas: a sacred space marked by a constructed form, lamps and offerings, rather than an anthropomorphic image of a deity.
Even the miniature, stupa-like structures erected along the banks of village waterbodies, around which villagers gather to offer arghya to the setting and rising Sun, have been noted by some observers to bear a visual resemblance to Buddhist stupas.
It has been suggested that the more interesting question is whether communities that lived in landscapes shaped by Buddhist monasteries and sacred structures retained older habits of creating temporary ritual spaces, even as their religious identities changed.
This is a hypothesis rather than an established finding, and it would require ethnographic and archaeological inquiry to test.
2. Buddhism and the Sun
The relationship between Buddhist culture and solar imagery is not imaginary. It is documented in early Indian art.
The study The Sun in Stone: Early Anthropomorphic Imagery of Sūrya in North India examines an important representation of the Sun on a railing pillar at Bodh Gaya, generally dated to the first century BCE. At the time, Bodh Gaya was a Buddhist site. The Sun image appears as part of a larger sculptural programme associated with the Buddha's life and the sacred site of his enlightenment.
The same study discusses solar representations in Buddhist artistic settings in Gandhara and the wider north-western region.
This evidence has been taken to suggest that solar imagery was not alien to Buddhist cultural environments and was capable of being incorporated into Buddhist visual and symbolic worlds.
It may be said to complicate a simplistic assumption that reverence for the Sun belonged exclusively to one religious tradition.
3. Fasting, discipline and the body as a site of devotion
Chhath is famous for its demanding observance. The vrati undergoes several days of preparation and ritual discipline, culminating in a prolonged fast commonly described as lasting approximately 36 hours. The fast is accompanied by restrictions on food, cleanliness, bodily discipline and the offering of arghya while standing in water.
There are interesting comparisons with Buddhist uposatha observances. Buddhist lay followers traditionally undertake special ethical disciplines on designated lunar days, including abstinence from food after noon and observance of additional precepts.
Buddhist monastic discipline also regulates food and eating times. Historical Buddhist accounts describe the Buddha's own experimentation with severe ascetic fasting before his rejection of extreme bodily mortification in favour of the Middle Way.
Buddhist uposatha and the Chhath fast may not be the same practice. Chhath's prolonged fast is not evidence of Buddhist derivation, and the Buddha's rejection of extreme fasting makes a simplistic equivalence particularly misleading.
Still, both traditions may be said to demonstrate how religious discipline can be embodied through food, restraint, purity and the regulation of everyday conduct.
4. Thekua, leaf patterns and the material memory of the past
The thekua is perhaps the most recognisable food offering of Chhath. Prepared from wheat flour, jaggery or sugar and ghee, it is traditionally shaped with wooden moulds. The designs are pressed into the dough before frying.
Thekua moulds carry floral, geometric and leaf-like patterns. Some contemporary observers have interpreted particular designs as resembling the peepal leaf or the Ashoka Chakra.
Such interpretations are evocative, particularly given the importance of the peepal tree in Buddhist memory and the association of the Ashoka Chakra with the history of the Mauryan emperor.
The thekua nevertheless offers an important research opportunity: the history of ordinary household objects can sometimes preserve cultural memory that formal religious texts do not record.
5. The geographical overlap with the Buddhist heartland
The geography of Chhath is significant.
Magadha, Mithila, Bhojpur and the wider middle Gangetic region were also major landscapes of ancient Buddhist activity. Rajgir, Nalanda, Bodh Gaya, Vaishali and other centres were connected to the growth, spread and institutional life of Buddhism. Chhath's historical heartland overlaps substantially with this wider cultural geography. The overlap has led some to argue that the possibility of long-term cultural exchange cannot be easily dismissed, though others remain unconvinced.
A tradition does not need to retain its original theological vocabulary to preserve older ritual forms. Customs can travel across generations, survive changes in political authority and acquire new religious interpretations.
The question worth asking is whether Chhath preserves elements of a much older regional ritual culture that existed alongside, interacted with and outlived the major religious institutions of ancient Magadha. This remains an open question.
A society does not become stronger by forcing every community to abandon its inherited practices. Nor does it become harmonious by demanding that every population accept a single cultural identity. Its strength lies in creating a shared social space in which different customs, memories and ways of life can coexist.
This is perhaps the most intriguing historical question.
The history of Indian religions is not a history of permanently separated populations. Communities interacted, adopted new beliefs, abandoned older institutions, returned to earlier practices and accommodated traditions that did not fit neatly into formal religious classifications.
Buddhism and Brahmanical traditions developed in continuous interaction. The decline of major Buddhist monastic institutions in parts of eastern India did not mean that every cultural practice associated with Buddhist populations disappeared. Nor did it necessarily mean that the populations living around those institutions abandoned their inherited customs.
It is possible that certain practices survived through household observances, agricultural traditions, seasonal festivals and local forms of worship.
It has been proposed that Chhath may offer an important case through which to investigate this possibility.
1. The hypothesis of Brahmin Buddhists and the emergence of Bhumihars
An important, though widely contested and unproven, historical hypothesis concerning the origins of the Bhumihar community was advanced by the Bengali Sanskrit scholar Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri in 1902.
In his essay Bābhan, published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Shastri proposed that the Babhans were descended from Brahmins who had become Buddhist Śramaṇas and consequently lost their former Brahmanical position.
He claimed that the Babhans were, in his interpretation, Brahmin Buddhists who had lost their caste and social position in Hindu society. He further speculated that, following the decline of Buddhism, they appropriated the lands of abandoned Buddhist monasteries, which he associated with his proposed derivation of Bhumihar from Bhūmi-hāraka, one who takes or appropriates land.
Shastri also relied on the geographical distribution of Babhans in western Bihar and eastern Kosala, regions where Buddhism had flourished.
This is a remarkable proposition because it connects three historical processes:
The conversion of Brahmin groups to Buddhism.
The decline of Buddhist institutions and the transformation of their landholding arrangements.
The emergence of a distinct landed community whose ritual position differed from that of conventional priestly Brahmins.
This proposition has been disputed by other historians and should be treated as a claim requiring verification, not as accepted history. It deserves examination against the available inscriptions, genealogies and colonial records.
2. The village of Barra and William Dalrymple's account
A particularly striking illustration of this theory appears in William Dalrymple's The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters.
In the essay concerning Bihar, Dalrymple describes his visit to Barra, a village whose inhabitants he identifies as Bhumihars. He reports the explanation, said by local residents, that its inhabitants were descended from Brahmins who converted to Buddhism during the reign of Emperor Ashoka, around 300 BCE, and who were subsequently denied readmission to the priestly Brahmin community after the decline of Buddhism.
The account is remarkable because it records a local community's historical explanation of its own ancestry.
It should be treated as evidence of a surviving local origin tradition—an oral claim—rather than independent proof of the tradition's ancient historical accuracy. Oral histories are valuable but contested historical material, and they need to be tested against documentary and archaeological evidence.
3. The contemporary discussion of the Bhumihar question
Historian William R. Pinch, in Peasants and Monks in British India, similarly examines the contested status of Bhumihars and their efforts to secure recognition as landed Brahmins during the colonial period.
4. The possible connection with Chhath
The question that follows is whether communities that moved between Buddhist and Brahmanical religious worlds carried with them older forms of ritual observance.
It has been hypothesised that a population whose ancestors had participated in Buddhist religious life, but whose descendants subsequently entered or were absorbed into a wider Brahmanical social order, may have adopted new religious identities while retaining household customs, seasonal rituals and forms of worship inherited from their earlier social environment.
Such continuity would not be unusual in the history of religions.
A community need not preserve the name of an earlier deity or the theological explanation of an earlier ritual to preserve its practices. A festival may acquire new stories, new deities and new meanings while retaining its older ritual structure.
This possibility becomes particularly interesting when we examine Chhath: direct worship of the Sun, the absence of indispensable priestly mediation, the centrality of fasting, the use of natural offerings and the preservation of regional folk songs.
"A notable hypothesis is that the profound vigour of Chhath celebrations conveys a poignant message to future generations. It reflects an enduring love for an older social order that was abandoned not out of desire, but out of necessity and survival."
Some have asked whether these practices might represent the survival of an older religious culture that was subsequently accommodated within a wider Hindu social order.
It is a question worth investigating, but it would be historically irresponsible to claim that the evidence has already answered it. The hypothesis remains unproven.
There is another way of understanding this history.
Religious traditions are rarely static. They absorb local practices, reinterpret older beliefs and accommodate customs that may have originated outside their formal scriptural traditions.
What is today recognised as Hinduism is itself an extraordinarily diverse religious civilisation. It includes Vedic traditions, Puranic traditions, Shaiva and Vaishnava schools, Shakta worship, village deities, tribal practices, regional cults, philosophical schools and countless household observances.
Not all of these traditions originated in the same period, under the same religious authority or within the same social structure.
Chhath is an illustration of this complexity.
It is widely recognised today as a Hindu festival. The Bihar government's official tourism account describes it as a major Hindu festival dedicated to the Sun. Yet the festival's actual observance retains a distinctly regional and folk character.
It is therefore possible to interpret Chhath as an example of accommodation without asserting that every one of its practices originated within Brahmanical ritual systems. This reading is offered as one interpretation among several, not as a definitive account.
This is not necessarily a story of one religion defeating another. It may instead be a story of communities carrying their customs into new social and religious arrangements.
The persistence of distinctive customs within a larger religious identity is not a contradiction. Some scholars argue that it is one of the ways in which cultural traditions survive; others dispute this framing.
Chhath has travelled far beyond its original regional heartland.
What was once particularly associated with Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and the Terai is now celebrated in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and numerous other parts of India. It has also travelled internationally with migrant communities.
The remarkable feature of this expansion is that the festival has not needed to abandon its distinctive identity to become accessible to others. People unfamiliar with its traditions have increasingly participated in its celebrations, while its essential ritual practices have remained recognisable.
The setting Sun is still honoured. The rising Sun is still welcomed. The offerings are still prepared at home. The songs continue to be sung. The riverbank continues to become a shared space of devotion.
The festival has expanded without having to erase its past.
There is a profound lesson here for the understanding of human civilisation.
A society does not become stronger by forcing every community to abandon its inherited practices. Nor does it become harmonious by demanding that every population accept a single cultural identity. Its strength lies in creating a shared social space in which different customs, memories and ways of life can coexist.
Chhath has been cited as an example suggesting that a tradition can retain its individuality while becoming part of a larger cultural world. It can preserve its regional language, its distinctive ritual discipline and its inherited forms of worship without becoming alien to the society in which it is practised.
This is not merely religious tolerance. It is cultural accommodation in action.
The history of humanity has repeatedly demonstrated that migration, exchange, adaptation and the coexistence of different traditions are fundamental to civilisational development. No single book, individual or religious institution has ever been the exclusive author of human civilisation. Its evolution is a collective process, shaped by generations of people who preserve, modify and transmit their inherited knowledge.
The best understood dharma of humanity must ultimately be the preservation of human life, dignity and peaceful coexistence.
Chhath offers a living reminder of the alternative.
Its history may be more complex than any single religious narrative. Its origins may reach further into the past than the surviving written record can presently demonstrate. Its practices may preserve memories of communities and cultural worlds that have long since changed their formal identities.
That is precisely why its history deserves serious investigation.
The greatest strength of a civilisation is not that it makes everyone the same. It is that it allows people to remain different without making them strangers to one another.
For many of its practitioners, Chhath is a celebration of that possibility: a festival of the river, the Sun, the soil, the household, the community and the enduring human capacity to preserve its roots while embracing a larger world.
- Advocate Mukesh Kishor, Managing Partner at Audacious Law Network, is a Supreme Court lawyer championing human and labour rights with a strong focus on fair labour practices and safeguarding fundamental freedoms.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are those of the author alone and do not represent any institution, organisation, community or official body. Contested historical claims are presented as interpretations or hypotheses, not as settled fact.
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