The Hindu year is marked by festivals dedicated to deities, re-enacting legendary stories and venerating sacred sites. The grandest festivals are held at places made holy by connection with gods, goddesses, miracles, and great teachers, or rivers and mountains; throughout the year these are important pilgrimage spots, visited by disciples keen to receive darshan, foretaste the world of the gods, and conquer merit. Important Hindu pilgrimage sites in Rajasthan include the Karni Mata temple near Bikaner; the town of Pushkar and its Brahma temple; the Sati Mata temple in Jhunjhunu, Shekhawati; and the Dargah in Ajmer, the most important place of Muslim pilgrimage in India, though also much visited by pious Hindus; as well as the various Hindu and Jain temples of Mount Abu.

Virtually every temple in every town or village has its own festival. The biggest and most fabulous in Rajasthan include the camel fair at Pushkar in November, and the Gangaur festival in late March or early April. While many festivals are religious in nature, amusement rather than somberness are generally the order of the day, and spectators are usually welcome. Indeed, if you are lucky enough to match your visit with a local festival, it may well prove to be the highlight of your trip. Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain festivals pursue the Indian lunar calendar and their dates thus vary from year to year beside the plain old Gregorian calendar.

Determining them more than a year in advance is a highly complicated business best left to astrologers. Each lunar cycle is divided into two paksa (halves): “bright” (waxing) and “dark” (waning), each consisting of fifteen tithis (“days” – but a tithi might begin at any time of the solar day). The paksa start respectively with the new moon (ama or bahula – the first day of the month) and the full moon (purnima). Lunar festivals, then, are observed on a given day in the “light” or “dark” side of the month. The lunar calendar adds a leap month every two or three years to keep it in line with the seasons. Muslim festivals follow the Islamic calendar, whose year of exactly twelve lunar months loses about eleven days per annum against the Gregorian. Islamic festival dates are only estimated as they depend on the concrete sighting of the new moon at the start of each month. You may, while in the region, have the opportunity of being invited to a wedding. These are jubilant affairs with great banquet, always scheduled on auspicious days. A Hindu bride dresses in red for the ceremony, and marks the parting of her hair with red sindhur and her forehead with a bindi. She wears gold or bone bangles, which she keeps on for the rest of her married life. Although the practice is officially illegal, large dowries often change hands. These are usually paid by the bride’s family to the groom, and can be controversial; poor families feel obliged to save for years to pay for their daughters to get married