Sindoor khela and Bijoya Dashami 2026: the boron, the game and the evening after

Look at the goddess's face on the day of Dashami. The sindoor is thick at her parting, there is a smear of red on her forehead, and at her lips, where no one touches her for the rest of the year, there is a sweet, pressed there by a woman who has just done her arati. The photograph above was taken on Bijoya Dashami in 2018, at a puja in Delhi. It could have been taken at any Bengali puja on that day, which is why it is hard to look at for long.

In Bengali belief, Bengali Wikipedia notes, the Puja is Durga's homecoming to her father's house in the Himalaya. Dashami is the day she goes back. The women of the para send her off the way a daughter is sent back to her in-laws: dressed, fed, with something sweet in her mouth and red at her parting. Sindoor khela is what they do for each other once she has been sent.

When is sindoor khela in 2026?

Sindoor khela 2026 is on Bijoya Dashami, Wednesday 21 October. Drik Panchang's Kolkata calendar lists the Sindoor Utsav and Bengal's immersion of the goddess both on that day, and its Bengal visarjan page gives the Dashami tithi as 12.50 pm on Tuesday 20 October to 2.11 pm on Wednesday 21 October. North India, the same page notes, does its visarjan a day earlier, on the Tuesday.

In practice the Dashami rites belong to the part of Wednesday that still has the tithi, so many pujas do the boron (the married women's farewell to the goddess) in the morning or at midday. Drik Panchang describes the sindoor in the evening. Both happen, and your para's priest decides which. The immersions follow through the rest of the day.

What happens at the boron

The order is the same in English and Bengali Wikipedia's accounts, and in most pandals you will see it happen in this sequence.

• The day's worship ends with the visarjan puja, the rite of farewell.
• Married women, traditionally in white saris with red borders, come up one by one with a plate for the boron and do arati to the goddess.
• Each touches sindoor to the goddess's forehead and feet, and offers her sweets and paan, often putting the sweet to her lips.
• Then the women put sindoor on each other's foreheads, and on each other's shankha, pola and noa, the conch, coral and iron bangles married Bengali women wear.
• Then the faces, and it becomes a game, which is where the name comes from.
• Last, they give each other sweets as prasad.

For us the moment that matters comes just before the sindoor: a woman standing in front of the goddess with the plate, close enough to see the paint on her eyes, knowing it is the last time this year.

What the sindoor is believed to do

The belief is a plain one, and both Wikipedias record it: a woman who plays sindoor khela by the proper custom will never be widowed. The women pray for each other's long and happy married lives, and, the same accounts say, family quarrels and small feuds between neighbours are settled in the smearing. Nobody knows how old it is. One theory gives it about two hundred years and places its birth in the zamindars' house pujas, as a way of bringing the household's wives together; another says it is as old as the Puja itself, about four hundred.

Who plays, and the argument about it

By custom, unmarried women and widows are kept out. In 2017 a campaign asked pujas to open it to widows, single women, transgender women and sex workers, as a bond between all women rather than a blessing on marriage, and some pujas now do. Others have not. The writer Taslima Nasrin has criticised the ritual as patriarchal, for the weight it puts on the married state of the goddess and of the women, and other critics add that girls who grow up watching it learn that a life without marriage is incomplete.

We think the argument is worth having, and that the boron itself points to an answer. What the women do before the game, sending a daughter home with sweets in her mouth, belongs to anyone who has ever sent someone off. If your puja has opened the plate to every woman who wants to stand in front of her, stand there.

After the river: how a Bengali Dashami ends

The best account of what comes next is more than a century and a half old. Kaliprasanna Singha, writing as Hutom in the early 1860s, walked his readers through a Calcutta Dashami: the goddess given doi-karma as bhog before the immersion, the immersion music striking up after the arati, and, once the idols were in the water, the nilkantha bird and the shankhachil set flying before the families came home with the ghot (the water pot of the puja). At home came shanti jal (water sprinkled for peace), and then everyone embracing everyone, kolakuli, and Durga's name written on a banana leaf. Then his line about the city on that evening, which nobody has improved on since: ‘ক দিন মহাসমারোহের পর আজ সহরটা খাঁ খাঁ কর্ত্তে লাগ্লো’, after days of grand show, the city today began to feel empty.

Much of that survives. The pranam to elders, the embrace, the sweets and the round of visits and phone calls that Bengalis call Bijoya still fill the days after. The old family pujas are one place to see it; our guide to the bonedi bari pujas of North Kolkata has where they are. And the goddess's daughter comes back to the house four days later, for Kojagari Lakshmi Puja.

Songs for Dashami evening

2:25

Bishorjon

Zee Music Bangla

From the film Sanjhbati, Zee Music Bangla, 2019, with Shaan and Anupam Roy credited. Two and a half minutes, and the saddest short song we carry for this day.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

3:06

Dhake Kathi Bisorjoner

90s Kid Prime

Sananda and Trisha sing the dhak of the immersion, three minutes, from a 2023 Puja compilation on 90s Kid Prime.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

10:10

Dashami, Pujar Dhak

Saregama Bengali

Saregama's ten minutes of Dashami dhak by Phani Natta, Joydeb Nandy, Manindra Das and Brajakanta Nandy. For the walk to the ghat, or for the balcony when you cannot go. Our dhunuchi naach post has the Ashtami version.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

3:09

Jaago Uma

SVF

From Srijit Mukherji's film Uma, SVF, 2018, with Rupankar and Anupam Roy credited. A song about Uma for the evening she has left.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

When the dhak stops, the Pujo mood still has the season's songs, and the Rabindra Sangeet mood has the quieter ones for the evening the city goes empty. For the whole week, day by day, there is our Durga Puja 2026 guide.

Pictures: The goddess after the boron on Bijoya Dashami, 19 October 2018: sindoor at her parting, a sweet at her lips.: Ramesh Lalwani, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped

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