Category: Wedding Traditions

Karva Chauth / Karwa Chauth, one of many Hindu festivals, is a fasting ritual observed by all married Hindu women who seek the longevity, prosperity and well-being of their husbands. This festival is very popular amongst married Hindu women in the western and northern parts of India, primarily in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh. During the Karwa Chauth festival, married Hindu women dedicate the day to their husbands. Normally, women who observe this festival are called “Saubhagyavati” meaning “joyous and happy status of wifehood.” The festival was emerged…

There are legends associated with the Karva Chauth festival. In some tellings, the tales are interlinked, with one acting as a frame story for another. The Story of Queen Veervati A beautiful queen called Veervati was the only sister of seven loving brothers. She spent her first Karva Chauth as a married woman at her parents’ house. She began a strict fast after sunrise but, by evening, was desperately waiting for the moonrise as she suffered severe thirst and hunger. Her seven brothers couldn’t bear to see their sister in…

  Karva is another word for ‘pot’ (a small earthen pot of water) and chauth means ‘fourth’ in Hindi (a reference to the fact that the festival falls on the fourth day of the dark-fortnight, or krishna paksh, of the month of Kartik). It is uncertain how the festival originated and how it came to be celebrated only in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. One hypothesis is that military campaigns and long-distance travel usually resumed around the time of the festival, as the area dried and numerous rivers…

Karva Chauth (Hindi: करवा चौथ) is a one-day festival celebrated by Hindu women in North India in which married women fast from sunrise to moon-rise for the safety and longevity of their husbands. The fast is observed in the states of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, western Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Gujarat. The festival falls on the fourth day after the full moon, in the Hindu lunisolar calendar month of Kartik. Sometimes, unmarried women observe the fast for their fiances or desired…

Whatever you believe, wherever you came from, you have traditions. Religious, cultural, familial, we all have them, and they are a huge component of what makes weddings wonderful! In Texas, we see a good amount of Christian weddings so we tend to know the traditions fairly well. However, it can be so easy to get caught up in the aesthetics of a wedding that we sometimes seem to forget that in a Christian wedding ceremony, it’s not a performance, but an act of worship before God. Your guests are not…

The typical Hindu wedding consists of the bride and the groom taking seven vows in presence of their loved ones, with the holy fire as their witness. This is a way for the couple to confirm their commitment and sincerity to the new relation they are entering. Each of these vows is accompanied by a phera or a round around the holy fire. Though most couples, in their eagerness to get over with the ceremony, may tend to overlook these vows, each of these seven vows has a deep religious…