Swaminarayan Jayanti 2025 Date

About Swaminarayan Jayanti

Marks the 1781 birth of Ghanshyam Pande at Chhapaiya near Ayodhya — the boy who became Sahajanand Swami and, to his followers, Bhagwan Swaminarayan. Falling on the same tithi as Rama Navami, the day peaks at 10:10 pm, his recorded birth hour, when Gujarati mandirs perform a special aarti.

Swaminarayan was orphaned at eleven and left home as the boy-ascetic Nilkantha Varni, famously standing on one leg for four months clad only in a loincloth. At nineteen he reached Saurashtra in Gujarat, where the sampradaya took shape; by twenty-five he led an order of five hundred sadhus and was campaigning against sati, female infanticide and child marriage. Devotees keep a nirjala vrat — a fast without even water — until the 10:10 pm aarti, then sing bal-bhajans celebrating his infant form. Before his death in 1830 he split the sangha into two gaddis via a document called the Lekh: Ahmedabad for the north, Vadtal for the south, each led by an acharya drawn hereditarily from his two nephews' lines — a structure that still governs the original sampradaya today.