Lohri

Lohri is the warm bonfire festival of Punjab and neighbouring parts of North India, celebrated in mid-January as winter begins to turn and the rabi harvest season advances. Families and neighbours gather around a fire, offer sesame, jaggery, peanuts, popcorn or grains to the flames, sing traditional songs and perform bhangra or gidda. Many Lohri songs remember Dulla Bhatti, a popular Punjabi folk hero associated in oral tradition with resisting oppression and helping young women; his name survives in children’s songs sung from house to house. The festival is especially joyful when a family has welcomed a new child or celebrated a recent marriage, making the bonfire a centre of community blessing. Its agricultural setting is equally important: sugarcane, sesame and newly harvested produce appear in food and offerings. Lohri therefore brings together seasonal change, harvest gratitude, Punjabi folklore, kinship and the simple human pleasure of gathering around fire during the coldest part of the year.

Lohri is valued for devotion, family tradition and the spiritual or seasonal meaning attached to the day.

A bonfire is lit after dark and circled, and sesame, gur, popcorn and rewri are thrown into it and handed round. The first Lohri after a wedding or a birth is kept large by that family. Sarson da saag and makki di roti are eaten, and the next morning is Maghi.

Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Jammu. It falls the evening before Makar Sankranti, so the same turn of the sun is Lohri here, Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Magh Bihu in Assam and Uttarayan in Gujarat - four different festivals of one astronomical event.