Akshaya Navami (Amla Navami) 2026: Date, Two Sunrises

The ninth tithi of Kartika’s bright fortnight goes by several names. North Indian households call it Akshaya Navami or Amla Navami; some calendars print Kushmanda Navami; in Bengal the same Navami carries Jagaddhatri Puja. Short answer for 2026: by the convention this site’s tables follow, Wednesday, 18 November 2026. The longer answer is that Thursday, 19 November 2026 has a real claim too, and a calendar that prints it has not made a mistake.

A Navami With Two Sunrises

There is no Akshaya Navami row in the site’s festival table, so the start and end below are computed with the site’s lunar code; on the 86 tithi instants where that code and the generated tables can be compared, they agree to within 1 minute. The Navami opens at 06:05 on 18 November 2026, the instant the Gopashtami Ashtami ends, and closes at 07:06 on 19 November 2026: 25 hours 1 minute, longer than a civil day.

That length is the whole difficulty. The daily panchang for New Delhi, which records the tithi current at each sunrise, reads:

• Tuesday 17 November, sunrise 06:45: Shukla Ashtami
• Wednesday 18 November, sunrise 06:45: Shukla Navami
• Thursday 19 November, sunrise 06:46: Shukla Navami
• Friday 20 November, sunrise 06:47: Shukla Dashami

Two consecutive sunrises in one tithi is what the almanacs call a vriddhi, an “increased” tithi. The plain sunrise rule cannot separate the two days; something else has to.

How Thin the Second Morning Is

The two sunrises are not held equally. On the 18th the Navami is 40 minutes old when the Sun comes up and runs through the entire day. On the 19th it survives sunrise by 20 minutes and then gives way to Dashami.

A morning observance makes the gap plain. Divide the 19th’s daylight into three, as the purvahna-madhyahna-aparahna scheme does, and its purvahna runs 3 hours 33 minutes; the Navami owns the first 20 minutes of it. The 18th’s purvahna, by contrast, is Navami from end to end. A puja kept in the forenoon therefore finds its tithi on the 18th and almost none of it on the 19th.

The generator that builds this site’s festival tables settles every vriddhi the same way: the first day wins. Its own note on the rule adds that a vriddhi tithi is exactly where authorities legitimately differ by a day, and that a calendar choosing the other day should not be “corrected”. This page takes the same line. The 18th is the date it gives; a printed panchang that gives the 19th, reasoning from the bare sunrise rule, is following a defensible rule and is not wrong.

Across India: Two Mornings, Six Cities

The Navami’s ends are single instants for all of India; the sunrises they are compared with move by more than an hour from Guwahati to Ahmedabad. With the sunrise function the city panchang pages use:

The figure in brackets is the distance between sunrise and the nearer end of the Navami. Where it is under half an hour the table declines to decide: the sunrise is computed with the seconds dropped, the tithi instant is computed too, and a local almanac is the right judge. The one exception is Delhi’s second morning: the generated daily table, worked independently of the code behind the tithi instants, records Navami at that sunrise, and the row says so.

Read down the columns and the east turns the question round. In Kolkata and Guwahati the Sun rises on the 19th at 05:51 and 05:44, and the Navami still has more than an hour to run — 1 hour 15 minutes and 1 hour 22 minutes. On the 18th their sunrises, 05:50 and 05:43, come before the Navami opens at 06:05, by under half an hour. If a local almanac confirms that, the Navami holds a single sunrise there, the 19th, and the sunrise rule points to it with no vriddhi to resolve. A Bengali panjika worked for its own city therefore has a straightforward reason to place this Navami, and with it Jagaddhatri Puja, a day later than a New Delhi reckoning. This page does not reproduce the panjikas; it shows why their date and the one above can both be right.

What the Names Mean (अक्षय नवमी)

Akshaya. The word means undecaying, not subject to loss. The name carries a claim the calendar tradition makes about acts done on the day, as the name of Akshaya Tritiya does; this page explains the word and makes no promise about what any act on the day will yield.

Amla. The Kartika Mahatmya praises the dhatri, the amla or Indian gooseberry tree, and connects it with Vishnu. North Indian household custom turns that into the day’s practice: the tree is worshipped, a thread is wound round its trunk, and families cook and eat a meal in its shade, often with amla on the plate.

Satya Yuga. Almanacs that list the yugadi tithis, the days on which each of the four ages began in Puranic chronology, assign the start of the Satya or Krita Yuga to this Navami. That is a statement about the calendar’s own scheme, reported as such.

Parikrama in Braj. In Mathura and Vrindavan the local custom walks the parikrama, the circuit of the town, on this Navami.

Kushmanda and Jagaddhatri. Kushmanda is the ash gourd, and some calendars use the gourd’s name for the day; this page does not have a reliable account of the custom behind it and leaves it at the name. In Bengal the Navami is the day of Jagaddhatri Puja, with its best-known celebrations in Chandannagar and Krishnanagar, with dates set by the Bengali almanacs as described above.

Between Gopashtami and Dev Uthani

The Navami begins where the Ashtami of Gopashtami 2026 ends, and it gives way to Dashami early on the 19th. That Dashami is still the tithi at sunrise on Dev Uthani Ekadashi’s date in the table, Friday 20 November 2026 — two days after the first Navami sunrise. That Ekadashi has the opposite problem to this Navami, a tithi too short to hold any sunrise at New Delhi; Dev Uthani Ekadashi 2026 sets it out. The bright fortnight closes with Kartik Purnima.

Akshaya Navami 2026 at a Glance

• Date by this site’s convention: Wednesday, 18 November 2026 (first of two Navami sunrises at New Delhi)
• Also defensible: Thursday, 19 November 2026, especially for calendars computed in the east
• Kartika Shukla Navami (computed): 06:05 on 18 November 2026 to 07:06 on 19 November 2026
• Sunrise and sunset on 18 November (New Delhi): 06:45 and 17:26
• Nakshatra and yoga at sunrise: Shatabhisha and Dhruva on the 18th; Purva Bhadrapada and Vyaghata on the 19th

Any other date can be read the same way in the daily panchang; the year’s table-listed festivals are in the 2026 festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: अक्षय नवमी (आंवला नवमी) 2026: तारीख और दो सूर्योदय.