Swami Vivekananda Jayanti 2026 Date

About Swami Vivekananda Jayanti

Two birthdays, one monk. The Ramakrishna Math observes Vivekananda's Jayanti on Paush Krishna Saptami — the seventh day of the waning moon after Paush Purnima, his tithi of birth in 1863. The Indian government instead fixed his Gregorian birthday, 12 January, as National Youth Day in 1984.

Narendranath Datta was born into a well-off Bengali family in Calcutta on 12 January 1863, which fell that year on Krishna Paksha Saptami of the month of Paush — seven days after Paush Purnima. Because the tithi drifts each year against the Western calendar, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission — the order he founded, headquartered at Belur Math on the Hooghly — keep his Jayanti on that lunar day. In 1984 the Government of India took a different route: it declared his fixed solar birthday, 12 January, as Rashtriya Yuva Diwas (National Youth Day), observed since 1985 in schools and colleges with speeches, processions and readings from his 1893 Chicago address at the Parliament of the World's Religions. So the saint gets two anniversaries a few weeks apart — one monastic, one civic.