Kartik Purnima and Guru Nanak Jayanti 2026

The day is also called Tripuri or Tripurari Purnima, after Shiva's destruction of Tripura, the three cities of the demon sons of Taraka. That's where Shiva gets his name Tripurari, “enemy of the three cities”. The myth is well attested, and Lochtefeld has it in his encyclopedia, but the date's link to it is a matter of tradition that we haven't traced to a text.

On this evening the ghats of Varanasi fill with lamps for what's called the Diwali of the gods. It's a huge spectacle today. Lamp counts in the press run to a million or more, but those figures aren't audited, and we don't know how old the festival's current scale is.

Sikhs celebrate Gurpurab, Guru Nanak's birth anniversary, on this full moon. Historically, the date is disputed. The Bala Janamsakhi gives Kartik, while most other janamsakhis, including the Puratan, give Vaisakh, in April, and W. H. McLeod and others have regarded the Puratan as the older. Some Sikhs argue for moving the date, while the Kartik observance remains the one most widely kept.

Lochtefeld describes this mainly as a bathing festival, in which a dawn bath in the Ganga or another river is believed to bring great merit. In Rajasthan, the Pushkar fair, with its camels and cattle, peaks on this day, when pilgrims bathe in the lake.

Jain pilgrims in Gujarat are reported to begin the climb of Shatrunjaya at Palitana on this day, once the rainy-season retreat has ended. We've only found this in secondary sources, so it's one for a Jain reader to confirm or correct.