Vijaya Ekadashi 2027: 3 or 4 March? Both Days and Parana

Vijaya Ekadashi has two possible dates in 2027: Wednesday, 3 March 2027 and Thursday, 4 March 2027. The dark-fortnight Ekadashi is current at sunrise on both mornings, so the question every household asks, which day to fast, has no single answer from the tithi alone. It depends on which calendar you follow, and for some calendars on which city you are in. This page lays out both readings, shows where the computed minutes are too thin to settle anything, and gives the parana that goes with each day.

A Tithi Longer Than a Day (विजया एकादशी)

By the site’s lunar code, the Krishna Ekadashi opens at 04:45 on 3 March, in the dark before dawn, and closes at 07:24 on 4 March, just after the following dawn. Neither instant is a row in the generated festival tables. The same code matches the DE421 tables to within 1 minute at the 86 tithi instants where the two can be set side by side.

The New Delhi daily table, which reads the tithi at each sunrise from DE421, prints Krishna Dashami on Tuesday the 2nd, Krishna Ekadashi on Wednesday the 3rd (06:44), Krishna Ekadashi again on Thursday the 4th (06:43), and Krishna Dwadashi on Friday the 5th. On the first of the two mornings the tithi is already 119 minutes old at sunrise; on the second it has 41 minutes left to run. That shape, one tithi spread across two sunrises, is what the almanacs call vriddhi, and it is the one case in which the plain rule “fast on the day whose sunrise holds the Ekadashi” names two days instead of one.

The Smarta Reading: Wednesday

Smarta almanacs judge an Ekadashi by sunrise, and the thing they guard against is Dashami still running when the sun comes up. On the 3rd it is not: the Krishna Dashami ends at 04:45, and in every one of the site’s 38 panchang cities the Ekadashi has been current for at least 60 minutes by local sunrise. With the first morning clean on their own test, Smarta calendars in a vriddhi generally keep the first day, which makes Wednesday 3 March the Smarta date. The second morning still opens in the Ekadashi, but only just, and the day that follows it is almost entirely Dwadashi.

The Vaishnava Reading: Thursday

Vaishnava calendars that follow the Hari Bhakti Vilasa move the test earlier, to arunodaya, 96 minutes ahead of sunrise. An Ekadashi with Dashami still current at that hour is, for them, touched by Dashami and set aside. On the morning of the 3rd, arunodaya in New Delhi comes just 23 minutes after the Ekadashi begins, inside the 30 minutes this site requires before it rests a ruling on a computed instant. This page therefore does not say whether the 3rd passes the arunodaya test in New Delhi. It does not need to, for two reasons. Vaishnava calendars in a vriddhi generally keep the second day anyway, and the second morning is beyond doubt on their test: at arunodaya on the 4th the Ekadashi has been running for about a full day, in every city. So the Vaishnava fast is Thursday 4 March.

City by City: Where the Minutes Run Out

The tithi changes at the same instant across India, but arunodaya and sunrise do not, so the margins move with each city’s sunrise. Computed for all 38 cities, the 3rd’s arunodaya falls clearly inside the Ekadashi in ten, the cities with the latest sunrises: Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Surat, Amritsar, Nashik, Jodhpur, Goa, Udaipur and Jammu. In Guwahati, the earliest sunrise on the list, Dashami is still current at arunodaya by 36 minutes, a clear failure of the test. The remaining twenty-seven are inside the 30-minute band, and in six of those, Kolkata, Patna, Varanasi, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar and Ranchi, the computed arunodaya even comes before the tithi begins, though by less than half an hour. None of those twenty-seven is decided here.

The second morning has a narrow edge of its own. In Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Surat, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Jammu, the Ekadashi outlasts the 4th’s sunrise by less than 30 minutes, so these computations cannot say for certain that the vriddhi exists there at all. If the 4th in fact dawns on Dwadashi in one of those cities, the Ekadashi holds a single sunrise, the 3rd, and since every one of them clears arunodaya on that morning, both readings would point to it. A local almanac that prints only Wednesday for one of these cities is not necessarily in error.

Each cell compares the computed tithi boundary with that city’s arunodaya or sunrise from the site’s solar code; the number is how far one is from the other. A listed city’s own sunrise and sunset, rather than a margin, are on the city panchang pages for 2026 and 2027; the panchang calculator covers New Delhi alone.

Parana After a Wednesday Fast (पारण)

The meal before the fast is simple to place. The Krishna Dashami covers all of Tuesday 2 March and runs on until 04:45 the next morning, more than ten hours past that evening’s sunset in every city, so an early supper on the 2nd sits inside Dashami wherever it is eaten.

The end of the fast takes more care. At sunrise on Thursday the 4th the Ekadashi is still current, and Dwadashi does not begin until 07:24. It then runs to 09:54 on 5 March, so its first quarter, the Hari Vasara that parana-printing panchangs keep clear of, stretches well past noon on the 4th. Read that way, the parana for a Wednesday fast falls in the afternoon of Thursday 4 March, after Hari Vasara is over and with more than three hours of daylight left in every city. Where a calendar does not apply Hari Vasara, the only bound is the start of Dwadashi at 07:24; follow the calendar your household uses.

Parana After a Thursday Fast

For those fasting on the 4th, Hari Vasara is spent by the afternoon of the fast day itself, and the constraint is the other end of Dwadashi. It closes at 09:54 on Friday 5 March, a little over three hours after the 06:42 sunrise in New Delhi and at least two and a half hours after sunrise in every city. The parana belongs to that morning, after sunrise and before 09:54; any later and it falls in Trayodashi. Anyone with a medical condition, pregnant, or on medication should talk to a doctor before keeping any fast.

Magha in the West and South, Phalguna in the North

The lunation that holds this Ekadashi opens with the new moon at 21:26 on 6 February, with the Sun in sidereal Capricorn; the Sun crosses into Aquarius on 13 February, before the full moon. Amanta calendars, which run each month from new moon to new moon and name it by the Sun’s sign at the start, call that lunation Magha, so for them Vijaya is Magha Krishna Ekadashi, in the month’s second half after the full moon of 04:53 on 21 February. North Indian purnimanta calendars begin a new month at that full moon, which makes the same fortnight the first half of Phalguna and the fast Phalguna Krishna Ekadashi. The day and the tithi are identical; only the label moves.

The site’s festival rules, which use amanta names, file Maha Shivratri as the fourteenth of Magha’s dark half, and the 2027 table places it on Saturday 6 March, two days after Vijaya’s second morning and before the new moon of 8 March closes the fortnight. The Maha Shivratri 2027 page covers that night; the Phalgun 2027 and Magh 2027 pages set out where each month begins and ends in both systems.

Rama at the Shore: the Katha

The katha recited for this Ekadashi, which collections variously trace to the Padma Purana and the Skanda Purana, is set on the eve of the war with Lanka. In its telling, Rama has reached the sea with his army and can see no way across. Lakshmana points him to the hermitage of the sage Bakadalbhya nearby, and the sage tells Rama of the Ekadashi of the dark fortnight and how it is to be kept. Rama keeps it, and in the katha the crossing to Lanka follows. The vrat takes its name, Vijaya, “victory”, from that ending. This page reports the story as the katha’s own and makes no claim about what keeping the fast brings.

At a Glance

• Candidate days: Wednesday 3 March 2027 and Thursday 4 March 2027; both sunrises hold the Ekadashi in New Delhi
• Smarta calendars, generally: Wednesday 3 March
• Vaishnava calendars, generally: Thursday 4 March
• Ekadashi tithi (computed): 04:45 on 3 March to 07:24 on 4 March
• Dwadashi (computed): 07:24 on 4 March to 09:54 on 5 March
• Parana, Wednesday fast: Thursday 4 March, in Dwadashi; afternoon if your panchang observes Hari Vasara
• Parana, Thursday fast: Friday 5 March, after sunrise (06:42 in New Delhi) and before 09:54
• Month: Magha Krishna (amanta), Phalguna Krishna (purnimanta)

The Ekadashi 2027 list sets Vijaya beside the year’s other split cases, and the Ekadashi vrat rules page explains the sunrise and arunodaya tests in general. The bright-fortnight Ekadashi before this one is on the Jaya Ekadashi 2027 page. For the rest of the season, see the March 2027 vrat list, the 2027 festival calendar and the festival pages. In Hindi: विजया एकादशी 2027: 3 या 4 मार्च? दोनों दिन और पारण.