Magh Mela 2027 Snan Dates: The Tithis Behind Each Bath

The annual Magh Mela on the sands at Prayagraj is built around a short list of bathing days, and nearly all of them are tithis: a full moon, a new moon, a fifth and a fourteenth. That makes them computable. This page takes the six days the tradition names, dates each one from the site’s DE421 panchang tables, prints when each tithi begins and ends, and checks it against the sunrise. It is not the Mela’s official bathing schedule. That schedule is announced by the Mela administration in Prayagraj, and the site holds no copy of it; read their notice for the dates they fix, the ghats and the arrangements.

The Bathing Days and Their Tithis (माघ मेला 2027 स्नान तिथि)

The table lists them in calendar order. One row is not a tithi at all but the Sun’s crossing into sidereal Capricorn, and it is handled differently below. The sunrise column is Varanasi’s, for a reason explained in the next section. Instants are IST.

Three rows are simple: one sunrise falls inside the tithi and that is the day. Two are not. Magh Purnima holds no sunrise anywhere the site computes, and Maha Shivratri’s sunrise day is the day after the one its festival row gives. Both are worked through below rather than smoothed over.

Why the Sunrise Is Varanasi’s

In the Prayagraj tradition the Magha bath is a dawn practice, taken at or before sunrise, so the useful question for each day is whether the tithi is current when the sun comes up. Tithi instants are the same across India, but sunrise is local. Prayagraj is not one of the site’s panchang cities, so the sunrise here comes from the site’s solar code for Varanasi, the closest city on that list, with Lucknow, to the north-west, run as a second check. Varanasi’s sun rises between 25 and 29 minutes ahead of New Delhi’s on these days, and Prayagraj lies between the two Uttar Pradesh cities used here.

That difference changes nothing on this list. For all five tithi baths, Varanasi, Lucknow and the New Delhi daily table give the same answer about which sunrise holds the tithi, and the nearest any of those sunrises comes to a tithi boundary is well clear of the 30-minute margin the site asks for before it takes a side on a computed instant. For your own town, use the panchang calculator.

Makar Sankranti: An Ingress After Dark

The ingress table has the Sun crossing into sidereal Capricorn at 21:05 on Thursday 14 January 2027, an instant the festival row, the sankranti table and the planetary ingress table all agree on. That is more than 3 hours after sunset in both Varanasi (17:28 by the site’s code) and New Delhi (17:45). Almanacs decide the bathing day for a sankranti from where the ingress falls against sunset, and a crossing this late in the evening is exactly the case their rules exist for. This page prints the instant and does not settle the day; the Mela notice and your own almanac do that. The background to the festival is on the Makar Sankranti 2027 page.

One consequence of the sky in 2027: the ingress comes 8 days before Paush Purnima, so the Sun is already in Capricorn when the month of baths opens.

Paush Purnima: Where Kalpavas Begins

The Purnima runs from 21:30 on 21 January to 17:47 on 22 January, and that end is the January full moon in the lunation table to the minute. Sunrise on the 21st comes before it opens; sunrise on Friday 22 January, at 06:44 in Varanasi and 07:13 in New Delhi, is inside it. One day, no second candidate. In the Prayagraj custom this is the bath with which kalpavas starts: the kalpavasis take up residence by the river for the month and keep a discipline of their own through it. The festival detail is on the Paush Purnima 2027 page.

Mauni Amavasya: One Full Day

The new moon that ends this Amavasya is at 21:26 on Saturday 6 February 2027 in the DE421 table. The start, 19:05 on 5 February, comes from the site’s lunar code, which matches the DE421 tables to within 1 minute at the 86 tithi instants it is tested on. The tithi opens in the evening and closes in the next evening, so the 6th is Amavasya from before dawn to after dusk. In the tradition this is the chief bath of the Mela, kept with a vow of silence for the whole day or part of it. The Mauni Amavasya 2027 page goes city by city and explains why the same day is Paush Amavasya in amanta calendars.

Vasant Panchami: A Tithi Over Before the Next Dawn

The festival row gives the Panchami of Magha’s bright half from 03:05 on 11 February to 03:18 on 12 February, about 24 hours long. It opens in the small hours of Thursday, so that sunrise is inside it, and it closes in the small hours of Friday, more than 3 hours before the next sunrise. Only 11 February qualifies. The Vasant Panchami 2027 page carries the rest of the day’s panchang.

Magh Purnima: No Sunrise Inside the Tithi

This is the hard one. The Purnima opens at 08:00 on Saturday 20 February, 91 minutes after Varanasi’s 06:29 sunrise, and the Moon is full at 04:53 on 21 February, 95 minutes before Varanasi’s 06:28 sunrise. Neither morning holds it, in Varanasi, in Lucknow or in New Delhi. A tithi with no sunrise of its own is kshaya.

The site lists it against the 20th, the day on which the tithi holds the daylight and the evening, as the Magh Purnima 2027 page explains. But a bath tied to the Purnima at sunrise has two imperfect candidates here, the 20th, whose dawn is still Chaturdashi, and the 21st, whose dawn is already past the full moon. How a given almanac or the Mela notice resolves that is its decision, and this page does not make it. In the Prayagraj custom this Purnima closes the kalpavas.

Maha Shivratri: The Night Rule, Not the Sunrise Rule

The last day on the list is outside the kalpavas month. The Krishna Chaturdashi opens at 12:04 on Saturday 6 March, more than 5 hours after Varanasi’s sunrise, and runs to 13:46 on 7 March. By the sunrise reading it belongs to Sunday 7 March, whose dawn is Chaturdashi everywhere the site checks. The festival row, though, records its rule as tithi at nishita kaal, and the night of the 6th is the one the Chaturdashi covers, so the table gives Saturday 6 March. This page follows the festival table in the list above and flags the difference here: a bath list built purely on the sunrise rule would read the 7th. The Maha Shivratri 2027 page sets out the night rule in full.

The Kalpavas Month, Measured

The tradition counts kalpavas from Paush Purnima to Magh Purnima, which is the north Indian month of Magha from one full moon to the next. In the lunation table the two full moons are 29 days, 11 hours and 6 minutes apart, with a single new moon, Mauni Amavasya, between them. Counted by the days the site lists, 22 January to 20 February is 29 days. Because the closing Purnima is kshaya, whether a household reckons the last morning as the 20th or the 21st moves that count by one, and the site does not choose between them.

The Sun changes sign inside the month. It is in Capricorn for Paush Purnima, Mauni Amavasya and Vasant Panchami, crosses into Aquarius at 10:04 on 13 February, and is in Aquarius for Magh Purnima and Maha Shivratri. From the first tithi bath to the last, 22 January to 6 March, is 43 days. Where the month begins and ends in each reckoning is on the Magh month 2027 page.

What the Tradition Says, and What This Page Says

In the Puranic account the Mela draws on, a bath at the Sangam in Magha carries particular merit, and Prayagraj custom holds the tithis above as the days for it. That is reported here as the tradition’s own view. The site adds nothing to it: it does not rank one bath above another, attaches no result to any of them, and makes no claim about bathing in a river in winter. Whether that suits you is a question for a doctor, and conditions at the ghats are a matter for the Mela administration.

Nor does the page read anyone’s chart, choose a muhurat, or time anything in a reader’s life. It does not say when the Mela starts or ends; that is an administrative decision. The full year’s observances are in the 2027 festival calendar, and the other full and new moons on the Purnima 2027 and Amavasya 2027 lists. In Hindi: माघ मेला 2027 स्नान तिथियाँ: हर स्नान के पीछे की तिथि.

Quick Reference

• Makar Sankranti: Sun into Capricorn at 21:05 on 14 January; bathing day not settled here
• Paush Purnima: Friday 22 January (tithi 21:30, 21 Jan to 17:47, 22 Jan; end from the festival table)
• Mauni Amavasya: Saturday 6 February (tithi 19:05, 5 Feb to 21:26, 6 Feb; end from the DE421 new moon)
• Vasant Panchami: Thursday 11 February (tithi 03:05, 11 Feb to 03:18, 12 Feb; end from the festival table)
• Magh Purnima: Saturday 20 February (tithi 08:00, 20 Feb to 04:53, 21 Feb; end from the DE421 full moon)
• Maha Shivratri: Saturday 6 March (tithi 12:04, 6 Mar to 13:46, 7 Mar; end from the festival table)
• Official schedule: the Mela administration’s notice, which this page does not reproduce