Introduction
Dev Deepawali, “the Diwali of the gods” is one of its most striking and culturally rich festivals. Celebrated on ‘Kartik Purnima’ (the full moon of the Hindu month of Kartika), it comes fifteen days after the public holiday of Diwali and turns the city’s riverfront into a massive, ceremonial arena of light. On the evening of that night, the ghats of the Ganges are illuminated with lakhs of diyas (earthen lamps), priests conduct elaborated aartis, river-reflections and boats become part of the display, and a thick, stratified ritual grammar that combines myth, piety, urban identity and tourism reaches its peak expression. The festival simultaneously serves as ritual honorific of the Ganga, mythic reenactment, civic pageant, and important pilgrimage and spectacle occasion.
The Mythic and Ritual Origins of Dev Deepawali
In traditional accounts it is linked with Tripura Samhara or the killing of the Tripurasuras, three asura-cities slain by Shiva and thereby links with Kartik Purnima’s broader association with Shiva worship and cosmic regeneration. The festival also is tied to the belief that on this full-moon night the gods come down to the Ganges to bathe and witness rites; lighting lamps on the ghats, in this account, is an act of welcome and reverence for divine guests. These accounts locate the festival within the theological geography of Kashi (Banaras/Varanasi) where river and city are co-constituent sites of salvation, ritual power and sacred history. The modern public spectacle of Dev Deepawali in Varanasi, the synchronized mass lighting of lamps at the ghats and the massive civic aarti has a comparatively recent institutional past. Local accounts suggest that the late twentieth century was a time of turning point when a series of ritual revivals and organized activities came to crystallize in the large-scale illumination of ghats that are now typical of the festival.
A number of local sources attribute starting the practice of mass lamp-lighting at ‘Dashashwamedh Ghat’ in the early 1990s to Pandit Kishori Raman Dubey, commonly referred to as Babu Maharaj, from whom the practice spread and was developed with the assistance of municipal authorities and volunteers. This contemporary intensification is overlaid upon a longer history of Kartik practices on the riverfront and is comparative to histories of urban ritual change in other Indian towns.
How the Festival Flourished: Urban Ritual, Community Effort, and Media
The flourishment of Dev Deepawali into an internationally recognized spectacle can be understood as the convergence of several forces. First, Varanasi’s distinctive cultural capital its reputation as a city of pilgrimage, Sanskritic learning, and continuous habitation provides a persistent religious and touristic audience.
Second, the ritual is highly visual and photogenic: rows of shimmering lamps, the reflective river, and choreographed aarti compose pictures that move freely through newspapers, travelogues, and, in the modern period, social media and television broadcasts.
Third, civic and institutional agent’s temple trusts, local community volunteers, religious organizations, and municipal governments, have spent resources and organizational capability in making the festival larger in scale, secure, and spectacular. These staged events create both devotionally resonant performances and an event that serves as a kind of city branding and cultural tourism. Accounts for the past few decades reveal that what was initially detailed, ghat-level acts of devotion have been augmented by municipal lighting projects, scripted cultural events, and grand-scale fireworks and laser shows on some years, extending the festival’s visual impact and attracting greater numbers of tourists.
Media coverage and tourism promotion have reinforced this growth. National and regional outlets routinely cover Dev Deepawali as one of Varanasi’s signature events; travel portals and pilgrimage guides place the festival high on itineraries; and video sequences of the aarti and lit ghats circulate widely online. These feedback loops spectacle ritual creating media buzz, which in turn pulls more people who then amplify spectacle have created the modern mass scale of the festival.
Ritual Workings: Space and Scale
On the Kartik Purnima evening the ritual geography of the city is literally lighted up. Starting from the southern ghats until the northern ghats, the stone steps are lined with the earthen lamps lit by priests, locals, volunteers and traveling pilgrims. The main aartis, particularly at ‘Dashashwamedh Ghat’ are of a greater ceremonial experience: dozens of priests offer coordinated offerings to the river, joined by Vedic and local chants, the sounds of conch shells, and the slow progression of the brass lamps waving rhythmically. Boats along the river are full of spectators whose forms, under the light of the lamps and fireworks above, frame the river through a collective public liturgy.
The sensual register of the evening, flame-light, incense, conches, temple bells and the smell of fried offerings is saturated and powerful for participants.
Scale is also a key feature of contemporary accounts: popular reports indicate hundreds of thousands, and in some festival accounts more than a million, lamps are aglow on the ghats; lakhs of tourists and pilgrims converge on the city; and the total human choreography takes hours of planning and an enormous amount of volunteer labour. Although exact numbers differ by year and source, the central message is the same: Dev Deepawali is celebrated on an unprecedented, quasi-urban level that marks it distinct from many neighbourhood or home Kartik celebrations.
Motifs and Symbols
The motifs and symbols of Dev Deepawali in Varanasi signify a multi-layered cultural imagination, in which light, river, and ritual cohere into an integrated sacred story. The lamp at the center of the festival, the diya, embodies hospitality to the gods, and purification of human life. The lighting of thousands of lamps along the ghats signifies the cosmic principle of overcoming darkness with knowledge and virtue, and the eternal triumph of good over evil.
This is closely linked to the symbolism of the Ganga as a sacred threshold between humanity and the divine, as an agent of purification from sins, and as a medium through which one can call forth the ancestors and the heavens. The lighting along the riverbank thus delineates the ghats as a threshold stage upon which divinity, ancestors, and devotee all gathered. The final motif arises from the social and performative aspects of the festival: the aarti was coordinated and choreographed in gestural acts, conch-blown, and chanted to transform ritual into a public spectacle of the sacred, where ritual exactitude now became theatre, and performances of the sacred were more than the yoga breath or chanting, but represented the presence of the sacred. The queuing of boats on the river faced the lit ghats to create a dazzling view of religion in the Ganga as a shining backdrop of faith, while fireworks and celestial representations elevated the experience of divine festivity. Meanwhile, the diya retains its homespun connotation of the home to civic space, as homes lit candles on the roof and veranda merge private and public space, home and city, to join together in a collective expression of faith.
Social Ecology: Who Does the Work?
Dev Deepawali is created by a diverse social ecology. Local priests and temple trust usually organize key rituals; volunteer groups and youth clubs provide tens of thousands of hands for lamp-setting and crowd control; municipal authorities offer security, lighting and sanitation; and the city’s informal economy, boatmen, hawkers, dhobis, guest-house operators, expands to cater to the festival crowds. This intricate division of labor highlights the festival’s rootedness in daily urban organization. Scholarship on South Asian festivalization underscores how such events redistribute labour, create seasonal livelihoods, and simultaneously intensify pressures on urban infrastructure, dynamics evident in Varanasi’s Dev Deepawali as well.
Contemporary Developments: Tourism, Management and Contestation
In recent decades Dev Deepawali has acquired multiple contemporary inflections.
First, the festival has become a cornerstone of Varanasi’s cultural tourism industry: travel packages, guided aarti viewings, and organized boat rides make the event accessible to non-pilgrim visitors.
Second, municipal and temple authorities have increasingly professionalized the event’s management: temporary crowd barriers, coordinated safety protocols, staged cultural programmes, and scheduled fireworks are employed to manage large crowds and media presence. This trend has been reinforced by the state’s promotion of Varanasi as a cultural and heritage city and channelling resources toward spectacle-boosting projects.
While this has been happening, the festival’s expansion has also been raising controversies and practical issues. Issues of pollution of rivers by lamp-wax, oil and firework waste have been flagged by civic organisations and environmentalists; solid-waste management and human sanitation on peak nights are an ongoing logistical challenge; and the moral economy of crowd commodification, where sacred rituals become intermediated for paying guests creates tensions between various stakeholders (volunteers, priests, and tour operators). These are not specific to Dev Deepawali, but they show how a living ritual has to balance contemporary environmental, economic and heritage-conservation pressures.
Lastly, media and digital culture have added another level of mediation. Close-up images, aerial photography and viral videos push the festival out of the physical confines of Varanasi and construct popular imaginations of the city’s holy image. Global circulation loops back into local decisions, for example, the organisation of laser displays and choreographed fireworks that are camera-friendly and shareable, even as they transform earlier, quieter modes of Kartik practice.
The Role of Dev Deepawali in the Ritual Calendar of Varanasi Denoting a summit moment in Varanasi’s ritual calendar, Dev Deepawali acts to finalize and renew seasonal cycles. The month of Kartik (roughly October-November) is full of shared public rites for honoring ancestors (shraddha), river worship, and for devotion to and worshipping of Shiva, whereas Dev Deepawali acts to bring all these strands together into a public moment of culmination for the purposes of reaffirming Varanasi’s special theological claims, not the least of which is its identity as a place of liberation. For pilgrims and residents alike, these evenings are ritualized social privileges of both presence and absence, a manipulation of time that brings families together, a time for social politeness, exchanging gifts, and honouring rituals, promised or observed, that join the living with the dead and the human with the divine.
Conclusion
Dev Deepawali in Varanasi is an event of multiple meanings: it is simultaneously an enactment of ancient myth, a local devotional practice, a fantastic urban ritual and a contemporary medium of heritage and tourism. Its semiotic structure – lamps, reflection-on-the-river, the coordinated aarti – provides a sense of hospitality to the gods and purification for mortals; its social production involves priests, volunteers, municipal agencies and businesses; and its trajectory in the present illustrates the possibilities and contradictions of ritual practice in a contemporary mediated city. While the size of the festival – and its media coverage – have expanded since the late twentieth century, the underlying symbolic economy of light as welcoming and purification, and river as sacred threshold, remains surprisingly stable.
Dev Deepawali provides a rich example of how tradition transmutes and multiplies in contemporary urban contexts: it is retained as the sacred while public culture and civic performance are re-invented in post-modern times of pilgrimage, preservation and spectacle.
References
Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light. Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
David Scheinbaum, Varanasi: City Immersed in Prayer. Staunton: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2022.
Michael D. Willis, The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of the Gods. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Manish Khattry & Priyoneel Basu, Kashi: Fairs & Festivals: Lakkha mela. Ishita Creations, 2020.
Cristiana Zara, “Rethinking the Tourist Gaze through the Hindu Eyes: The Ganga Aarti Celebration in Varanasi, India.” Tourist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2015), pp. 27-45