Vishwakarma Puja 2026 Date

About Vishwakarma Puja

One of the few Hindu festivals fixed to a solar date — September 17, when the Sun enters Virgo (Kanya Sankranti). On this day factories, garages and workshops across eastern India down tools and worship the tools themselves, alongside an idol of Vishwakarma, the Rigvedic architect of the cosmos.

Vishwakarma appears in two hymns of the Rig Veda (10.81 and 10.82), where he is compared to a smith and a carpenter as much as to a priest. Later texts credit him with the golden Lanka and the Pushpaka vimana of the Ramayana, the cities of Dwarka and Indraprastha in the Mahabharata, Shiva's trident, Vishnu's discus, Indra's vajra, and the wooden Jagannath idols at Puri. His image changes sharply by region. In western India he is shown as a white-bearded elder with a swan — a clear nod to Brahma. In Bengal and Jharkhand he is young, muscular and moustached, riding an elephant. In the south he appears with the goddess Gayatri, with five faces and ten arms. Bengal pairs the puja with kite flying, and immerses the clay idol in a river the next day — much like Durga Puja in miniature.