Chhath Puja: This is how Sun is worshipped during the festival

Chhath Puja, the prominent religious festival of the Bihari community is being celebrated in a large scale in Sundargarh district by a sizeable Hindi-speaking migrant population from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP).

The festival to be marked from Kartik Shukla Chaturthi to Saptami began on Sunday and the devotees take a holy bath in Chaturthi only by consuming consecrated food items. On Monday, the “Kharna” ritual was performed in which “Bratins” took specially prepared porridge in the evening.

Devotees, locally known as “varti”, wore new clothes and sang folk songs as they prayed and lit small diyas, or earthen lamps, that were set afloat on rivers, lakes and other water bodies.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today greeted people on the occasion of “Chhat puja”, a festival celebrated in parts of the country where married women observe fast for almost 36 hours.

Thousands of devotees gathered to offer “arghya” to the setting sun during the Chhat puja festival.

Ranipokhari has been cleaned up and decorated for the Chhath celebrations.

The authorities also designated over two dozen “ghats” in Patna as unsafe and risky.

Traffic snarls were reported in several parts of the national capital amidst Chhath festival today even as Delhi Traffic Police used a helicopter to monitor and regulate vehicular flow in and around the ghats here that were witness to huge gatherings of people.

The pageant is widely known on the sixth and seventh days after Diwali.