Vasant Panchami

Vasant Panchami, also called Saraswati Day, falls on the 5th day of the bright fortnight of the lunar month of Maghi. It celebrates the day on which the goddess Saraswati was born and is celebrated enthusiastically wherever Hindus live.

Saraswati is the daughter of Lord Shiva and the goddess Durga. She is the goddess of wisdom, art and music and gave human beings the powers of speech, wisdom and learning. She is represented pictorially with four hands (representing four aspects of human personality in learning: mind, intellect, alertness and ego). She holds sacred scriptures in one hand and a lotus (symbol of true knowledge) in the second. With her other two hands she plays the music of love and life on a stringed instrument called the veena. She usually wears white, symbolising purity, and rides a white swan that symbolises purity and discrimination. Saraswati is also a prominent figure in Buddhist iconography, where she is the consort of Manjushri.

On Vasant Panchami, the figure of Saraswati is dressed in yellow, most people also prefer to wear yellow clothes, and yellow sweets are given to family and friends. Other activites carried out by the devout are feeding Brahmins, ancestor worship (Pitri-Tarpan) and worshipping Kamadeva, the god of love. Educational institutions organise special prayers for Saraswati Day.

The most important feature of this day is that it is the day on which children are taught to read and write their first words on this day, because it is considered an auspicious day to begin to read and write.