Karva Chauth

The oldest written mention of the fast is the Karaka Vrata in the Narada Purana. Karaka means a water pot and chaturthi means the fourth day, which is where the name Karaka Chaturthi, and then Karva Chauth, comes from. The Purana places it on the fourth day of the dark fortnight of Kartika and says that women are authorised to keep it.

What the passage then describes is not quite the day we keep. She bathes and adorns herself. She worships Ganesha. She prepares ten karakas of cooked rice and dedicates them to him, and she gives daan to married women and to brahmanas. At night, once the moon has risen, she offers arghya — and then she eats sweets and cooked rice.

Two things in that are worth sitting with. The deity named is Ganesha, not Parvati. And the vrata has a term: sixteen years, or twelve years, or for life. It is taken up for a span and completed, which is a different shape from the one the day now has, where a single year missed is treated as a failure of something.

The text also does not say the fast is for a husband’s long life. In this early form it is a woman’s own vrata, for her married life and her household. The reading of it as a demonstration of devotion to a man is the most recent thing on the day and is named in nothing.

Alongside the written vrata, folk tradition has its own account of how the day began, and it has two stories rather than one. Both are recited in the evening and both are given in full further down. Neither is in the Narada Purana, and neither needs to be — they are what the day is told through, not what it rests on.

What has attached itself since — the sieve, the shringar counted to sixteen, the photography, the framing of the fast as proof of something — is practice and culture. Some of it is beautiful. None of it is prescription, and none of it is what the two kathas are about.