Vasant Panchami 2028in Nathdwara

Vasant Panchami — the fifth day of the bright fortnight of Magha — marks the return of vasanta, the spring season, after the long winter. The festival's name carries both meanings: panchami of vasanta, fifth day of the spring season; and panchami of vasanta-shastra, the bright day on which the goddess of word and learning is said to have first appeared. The Saraswati Purana, the Brahma Purana, and the Devi Bhagavata Purana each carry the story.

In the cosmogony given in the Brahma Purana, after Brahma had finished his shaping of the material world from the primordial waters, he found that the world was complete in form but completely silent. The waters had no songs; the wind blew but said nothing; the stars wheeled in their patterns but produced no music; the great beings he had shaped — devas, asuras, sages — were perfectly made but were unable to speak. Brahma realised that the world he had built was unfinished — it had no vak, no speech, no sound that would let one thing call to another. He turned to Vishnu and asked what he had failed to bring. Vishnu replied that the work was not Brahma's to complete alone; he gave him permission to invoke the consort of speech itself. Brahma sprinkled water from his kamandalu into the sky and chanted; from his own mouth then emerged a goddess — fair-skinned, dressed in white, seated on a white swan, holding a veena in two hands and a manuscript-text (pustaka) and a rosary (akshamala) in the others. She bowed to Brahma; he asked her to give the world the gift it lacked. The Saraswati Purana describes her then plucking the first three strings of the veena — sa, ri, ga — and the sound that came forth filled the world. The rivers found their courses had songs; the wind found that it carried words; the stars discovered that their patterns made music; the silent beings discovered they could speak. From the music she gave fell raga and shruti and chhanda — the whole of melody, the whole of metre, the whole of language. The day she appeared is the day the festival commemorates.

A second tradition belongs to the Devi Bhagavata Purana, where Saraswati emerges not from Brahma's mouth but from the river Saraswati at the conjunction of three sacred streams — the Saraswati flowing from the Himalayas, the Yamuna, and the Ganga — at the place known as Triveni. The conjunction is itself the site at which the goddess is most worshipped, and the Saraswati river — which the Vedas describe as the greatest of all rivers and which modern geologists identify with the dried Ghaggar-Hakra system — is the goddess in her water-form. The river goddess and the speech goddess are one: just as a river carries words downstream from one settlement to the next, so the goddess carries all knowledge from the past to the present.

A third tradition is the story of Saraswati and Brahma's daughter-bond. The Brahmavaivarta Purana gives a startling account in which Brahma, having created Saraswati, finds himself drawn to her by her beauty — but realises mid-attraction that she has come from his own mouth and is therefore his daughter and not a permissible object of desire. He withdraws, performs penance, and is granted by Vishnu the boon that thereafter Saraswati would be worshipped by all of creation precisely as a daughter is worshipped — with restraint, with offerings of yellow flowers (the colour of the spring mustard fields and of the body of pollen that fills the air), and with the gift of the first new things of the year. This is why so much of Vasant Panchami practice is gentle and concerns the very beginning of education: small children are given their first lesson in writing letters with their finger on a plate of uncooked rice; books are placed before her image and left there overnight to be blessed; musical instruments are tuned anew. Yellow is everywhere — turmeric in the kitchen, marigold and mustard flowers in the shrine, yellow saris and yellow turbans, yellow rice and yellow sweets — because yellow is the colour of vasanta, of mustard fields in full bloom across the plains, of the bee's pollen, and of speech itself in its earliest most-respectful form.

In Bengal, Vasant Panchami is observed as Saraswati Puja, the major school and university festival; students take the day off, place their textbooks before her image at dawn, sing the Saraswati Vandana, and are forbidden to study — the one day in the year when the goddess of learning insists on being approached not through more study but through rest. The festival therefore carries a quiet teaching: that what gives speech and learning is not effort alone, but the prior gift of the goddess. Without her, all of the most carefully built worlds would still be perfectly silent.