Chhath Puja Sun Worship Ganga River Bihar

Chhath Puja is the ancient Vedic harvest festival of Bihar, Jharkhand, and eastern Uttar Pradesh, held twice annually on the sixth day after Diwali (Kartik Chhath) and in summer (Chaitra Chhath), in which devotees called Vratis worship the sun god Surya and his sister Chhathi Maiya by standing in river, pond, and tank water at sunset and sunrise for two consecutive days without food or water. The ritual involves bathing in the Ganga or local water body, preparing prasad of thekua (fried wheat-jaggery biscuit), rice kheer, citrus fruit, and sugarcane at home on a clean earth stove using no onion or garlic, and carrying the prasad in bamboo baskets called soop and daura to the ghat for water offering. The sunset offering (Sandhya Arghya) and sunrise offering (Usha Arghya) require the Vrati to stand hip-deep in the water, fold hands, and direct the first and last rays of the sun through an offering of water from a copper vessel. The festival is unique in Indian ritual practice in having no temple, no priest, no idol, and no paid religious authority, being conducted entirely by the devotee family. Chhath Puja draws five to ten million people to Ganga and Sone River ghats in Patna alone. The festival has migrated globally with the Bihari diaspora and is now observed on Mauritius, Trinidad, and Fiji.