Karma Puja 2027

About Karma Puja

Karma Puja, or Karam Parab, is the harvest-season festival of the Karam tree, kept on the eleventh day of the bright fortnight of Bhado; in 2027 it falls on Saturday, 11 September 2027. Adivasi and Sadan communities of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, West Bengal and Assam's tea gardens plant a Karam branch in the village dancing ground, pray for their crops and their brothers, and dance through the night.

Karma Puja falls on Ekadashi, the eleventh lunar day, of the bright half of Bhado, in late August or September. The kharif paddy is in the ground and the fields are green. Hindu almanacs mark the same day as Parsva Ekadashi, which is why Drik Panchang's Ranchi calendar is a reliable guide to the date, though Drik itself does not list Karma.

Jharkhand gives it a state holiday, and the committee that sets central government holidays in Ranchi lists Karma as a restricted holiday on the state's date. West Bengal declared 22 September 2026 a state holiday for Karam Puja, and its order covered tribal employees in the state's tea gardens too. In 2025 the festival fell on 3 September, also the Bhado Ekadashi.

Karam is kept by Adivasi communities and by Sadan, the non-tribal native communities of the Chotanagpur plateau. Accounts of the festival name the Oraon, Munda, Ho, Kharia, Bhumij, Baiga and Kudmi among others. Families who moved to Assam's tea gardens generations ago took it with them. Each community and each village keeps it a little differently, and some villages hold their Karam on another day. What follows is the common shape.

The week before: the jawa

About a week before Karma, the unmarried girls of the village sow grain in small baskets: rice, wheat, maize and other seeds, nine kinds in some accounts. These sprouts are the jawa. The girls, called Karam-aiti in many villages, take on a vow for those days. They eat simply, tend the baskets, and sing to the seedlings morning and evening to wake them.

The jawa ties the festival to the crop: the sprouts stand for the grain the village hopes to harvest. On the festival night girls give each other jawa shoots, and the exchange marks a friendship between girls that is meant to last.

The day and the night

1. Morning
   Rice and the fast

   Sisters begin a fast, many of them without water, for their brothers. Women pound rice in the dheki, the wooden foot-pounder, for the flour used in the evening's food.

2. Afternoon
   Bringing the branch

   Young men and women go to the forest with drums, worship a Karam tree and cut a branch. It is carried back singing and is never allowed to touch the ground.

3. Evening
   Planting it in the akhra

   The branch is set in the middle of the akhra, the village dancing ground, plastered with cow dung and decorated. The Pahan, the village priest, leads the puja.

4. Night
   Story and dance

   After the offerings the Pahan tells the Karam story. Then the drums start, and men and women dance in lines around the branch until dawn.

5. Next morning
   Fields and river

   The branch is taken round the fields or set in one for a while, then immersed in a river or pond. The fast ends and the jawa is shared out.

The offerings laid before the branch are what the land gives at this season: cucumber, flattened rice, jaggery, curd, honey, forest fruit, vermilion and sacred thread, with the jawa baskets set in front. In many Adivasi communities rice beer, called hadiya or handia, is offered too, and in some a fowl. This is part of the rite, not a party on the side. Each worshipper tells the Pahan a wish, for health, for children, for a good crop, and he carries it to Karam Devta.

Planting the branch in the field is practical as well as sacred. Villagers say it guards the crop, and birds that perch on it eat the insects in the paddy.

Karam

The tree at the centre of the festival, and the festival itself; Karam Devta is the spirit of the tree

Jawa

Grain sprouts grown in baskets by unmarried girls in the week before Karma

Karam-aiti

The girls who keep the jawa and the vow

Akhra

The village dancing and meeting ground where the branch is planted

Pahan

The village priest in many Jharkhand villages; called Dehuri in some regions

Dheki

A wooden foot-operated rice pounder

Hadiya

Rice beer, offered in the puja in many Adivasi communities

Mandar

The two-headed clay drum played for Karam dances

The stories told at the akhra

The Pahan tells a story, and the story changes from village to village.

A widely told version, as tradition tells it, is about two brothers, Karma and Dharma. Karma comes home rich from a voyage and finds his family too busy dancing at the Karam to greet him. In anger he throws the Karam pots into the sea, and the family's wealth goes with them. He sets out to win them back, helping everyone he meets on a long, hungry road, until Karam Raja tells him the pots return only if the festival is kept on the eleventh day of Bhado. A Lodha Sabara telling ends that way, which is one explanation of the date. Other tellers draw the lesson that work and right conduct need each other.

Another version, recorded by anthropologists in Jharkhand, has seven brothers working in the fields whose wives, dancing around a Karam branch, forget to bring the men their lunch. The angry eldest throws the branch into the river, and the family is ruined until they find it again and worship it. Bhumij, Lodha Sabara and Pauri Bhuiyan families have their own tellings.

Brothers and sisters are a common thread. In Jharkhand today Karma is often described as a festival of sibling love, with sisters fasting for their brothers' long life, alongside the older prayer for crops and rain. Both readings are true to the day.

Wishing someone well on Karma

In Ranchi, Karam is a public festival as well as a village one. In 2025 Chief Minister Hemant Soren attended the Karam Mahotsav at Ranchi Women's College, and in 2026 Governor Santosh Kumar Gangwar joined a Karam-eve programme at Bero. President Droupadi Murmu posted Karam wishes the same year, linking the day to gratitude to nature and to brotherhood.

Karam falls about a week after Odisha's new-rice festival, Nuakhai. Its spring counterpart on the plateau is Sarhul, the festival of the sal flower. Jharkhand marks its statehood on Jharkhand Foundation Day.

How to wish someone on Karma Puja

A good Karma wish names what the day is about in the community's own terms, the Karam branch, the jawa sprouts, the fields and the bond between brothers and sisters. For a sister keeping the waterless fast, wish her strength and offer help. Keep it warm and respectful, never exoticise the rites or joke about rice beer, and don't fold the festival into another tradition. A line in Nagpuri or Hindi lands well with friends from Jharkhand.

Write a few lines in your own words, pick a design and share it as one link on WhatsApp, Instagram or anywhere else. They open an animated card made just for them, with no app and no sign-up.

Language tip: English, Hindi + Nagpuri, Kurukh.

Good to know: Describe the rites in the community's terms (Karam Devta, akhra, Pahan, jawa); hadiya and fowl offerings are part of the puja in many communities, not a joke. Don't fold it into another tradition. Kudmi tribal status is a live political issue: don't label communities.

When is Karma Puja in each year?

Karma Puja is set by the Hindu lunisolar calendar, so it falls on a different date each year. In 2027 it falls 11 days earlier than in 2026.

Frequently asked questions