On the last day of 2025, I found myself at a popular south Indian vegetarian eatery in New Delhi. A huge picture of the founder’s guru hung on the wall near a lamp and other visuals that symbolised Shaivite devotion. As I waited for my takeaway, a colourful garland of giant balloons arrived to decorate the place. An attendant sporting sacred ash on her forehead told a colleague in Tamil: “Only now it feels like a new year.”
The incident happened after a week that saw zealots disrupting Christmas celebrations across India, taunting fellow Hindus for sporting Santa caps. Such disruptions are an exception to the Indian rule of celebrating festivals—looking beyond faith. Multicultural bonhomie is reinforced by joyful social media posts like the clichéd one on Kolkata’s Nahoum’s bakery: “It is the only place in the world where the Hindus stand in queue to buy Christmas cakes from a Jewish bakery made by a Muslim baker.”
But there is more to this than a penchant for festive fervour. There is no such thing as a single new year’s day for most Indians. Apart from Hindus, we have Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Buddhists celebrating their own turns of the calendar.
While Christians start their era with what is the most widely accepted birth year of Jesus Christ, the Sikhs have their Nanakshahi calendar honouring Guru Nanak, on which the year starts around March 14. But then, Sikhs also have their harvest-linked Baisakhi around April 14 to mark the solar new year coinciding with the start of the Khalsa order by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699.
Bengali Hindus mark the same day as Poila Baisakh, as do most Tamilian Hindus with the start of the Chitthirai or Chaitra month. The Keralite Hindu new year often varies by a day; this year, their Vishu falls on April 15. The divergence is attributed to differing calculations on when the sun enters the zodiac sign of Aries, the day the Assamese celebrate as Bihu.
Things change from the solar to the lunar calendar in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The Ugadi festival for the southern states and Gudi Padwa for Maharashtrians fall this year on March 19.
All that makes me scoff at a sticker I once saw in Delhi that questioned Hindus celebrating on January 1: “Videshi nav varsh par yeh kaisa swadeshi harsh?” (How can natives celebrate a foreign new year?) But no one really cared.
This sticker was presumably by hardliners who follow the Vikram Samvat era, marking the ascent of King Vikramaditya. Most northerners do not know about other new year days differing by region, calendar calculations and harvest seasons. But many Indians know the Vikram Samvat year, thanks to stock exchanges that mark Diwali as the new year’s day with their auspicious ‘mahurat’ trading.
The Samvat calendar is somewhat complicated. It calculates months on the lunar cycle but is synchronised with the solar year by adding an extra month (a job done by the leap year in the Gregorian calendar). The Vikram era starts 57 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar, which was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582 as a new standard. It marks King Vikramaditya’s victory over the Shakas (nomadic Scythian warriors of Iranian origin).
Circa 1935, the Dravidian movement added a revised new year to Tamil culture by introducing the Thiruvalluvar aandu (Thiruvalluvar year) commemorating the poet-philosopher’s birth year calculated at 31 BC by spiritual scholar Maraimalai Adigal. Tamil Nadu officially adopted that calendar under DMK rule in 1971. However, in 2011, AIADMK Chief Minister Jayalalithaa overturned her rival’s decision to celebrate the birth of the month of ‘Thai’ (January 15) as the Tamil new year’s day and restored it to the popular mid-April day. There has been no reverse swing since.
What’s laudable in this confusion of calendars is the practice of people from different faiths or regions greeting each other. I get Pongal wishes from non-Tamilians and join many in wishing Parsis on Navroz. Indian Zoroastrians mark their new year in July or August (August 16 this year) following the Shahenshahi calendar, unlike Iranian Zoroastrians who mark it with the Spring Equinox in March. Jains follow the popular mid-April new year. Muslims are aligned to the Hijra, starting in 622 AD when the Prophet Muhammad migrated with his followers from Mecca to Medina. This year, the Muslim new year starts on June 16.
Some Tamil publishers add the Muslim Hijri year to their calendars that run from January 1 in tear-away sheets that also announce a wide range of Hindu festivals and auspicious days.
Buddhism was born in what is now Bihar, but its adherents across Asia differ in their new year’s day. Theravada Buddhists in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar mark it on the first full moon day after mid-April, while the Mahayana followers in China, Korea and Vietnam do it on the full moon day in late January or early February. Tibetans do it in February or March. Lunar calendars add their own layer of complication to cultures influenced by tradition, ethnicity and colonialism. Indian Buddhists are split between all three categories and thus have three separate calendars.
The new year is a good time to take stock of the diversity that offers Indians more opportunities to celebrate. On that note, let me wish you a happy 2026. If you missed greeting someone on January 1, do not fret. There’s always a new new year’s day around the corner!
Madhavan Narayanan | REVERSE SWING | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)