Chhath Away From Bihar: How Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi Build Their Own Ghats

The first thing you notice is the turmeric. It arrives before the singers, before the bamboo soop and the thekua, before the crowds, a sharp yellow stain on the sand at Juhu that tells you the ghat is being claimed. By the time the sun sets on Panchami, a stretch of Mumbai's most famous beach has become, in every ritual sense, the Ganga.

Chhath Puja does not travel lightly. It is among the most demanding of Hindu vratas, four days without sleep for the vratins, two sunrises and one sunset spent standing waist-deep in water, offerings arranged with a precision that has no shortcut. That it has taken root in cities a thousand kilometres from Bihar and Jharkhand says something about the communities who carried it there, and about what a festival must do to survive displacement.

Mumbai's Chhath is a story of the 1970s and 1980s, when Bihari and Purvanchali workers arrived in large numbers for the textile mills and later the construction boom. Juhu Beach became the primary ghat by practical logic: it was the longest accessible shoreline in the western suburbs, and the communities settling in Andheri, Goregaon and Malad needed water within reach. Today, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation formally designates Juhu and Versova as Chhath ghats, deploying sanitation teams and temporary lighting rigs for the four-day window.

What the BMC cannot supply is the atmosphere. That is assembled by hand. Families arrive the evening before Kharna carrying the same clay pots their grandmothers used in Patna. The bamboo soop, the flat winnowing basket that holds the prasad, is sourced from vendors who appear in Dharavi and Kurla only in the weeks before Chhath, then vanish. The thekua, the hard wheat-and-jaggery biscuit that is the festival's signature offering, is baked in homes in Chembur and Bhandup through the night before Sandhya Arghya. The Arabian Sea is not the Ganga, and no one pretends otherwise. But the ritual does not require the Ganga. It requires water, and it requires the community to treat that water as sacred for the duration. Mumbai does both.

Delhi's relationship with Chhath is more complicated, because Delhi's relationship with the Yamuna is more complicated. The river that receives the Sandhya Arghya offerings at ITO, Kalindi Kunj and the ghats near the Signature Bridge is among the most polluted stretches of any river in the country. The Central Pollution Control Board has repeatedly flagged the Yamuna's dissolved oxygen levels through winter as critically low in these sections. Devotees know this. They stand in it anyway.

This is not ignorance. It is a form of insistence, that the ritual geography of home will be honoured regardless of what the city has done to its river. The Delhi government has, in recent years, set up alternative Chhath ghats at Sanjay Lake in Trilokpuri and at several points along the Najafgarh drain, with treated water trucked in for the arghya. Some families use them. Many return to the Yamuna, because the Yamuna is what they came to stand in.

The ghat at ITO on Sandhya Arghya evening is one of the genuinely overwhelming public spectacles in India. Estimates for attendance across Delhi's ghats run into the hundreds of thousands. The singing, the Chhath geet, performed live by groups of women through the night, carries across the water in a way that no recording captures. If you are in Delhi in the days around Chhath Panchami and Shashthi, and you have not been to a ghat at dusk, you have missed the city doing something it does better than anywhere else.

Kolkata's Chhath geography is different again. The city has no great river ghat culture tied to Chhath, the Hooghly belongs to Durga Puja. Chhath here happens at the lakes: Rabindra Sarobar, Subhas Sarobar, and the smaller water bodies in north Kolkata neighbourhoods where Bihari and UP communities have lived since the colonial era.

Rabindra Sarobar became contentious in the late 2010s when the Calcutta High Court restricted Chhath celebrations there, citing ecological damage to the protected lake. The community moved in part to Subhas Sarobar and to the Hooghly ghats at Babughat and Outram Ghat, which the Kolkata Municipal Corporation now formally prepares for the festival. The compromise has been imperfect on both sides, but the celebrations have continued.

What Kolkata adds that the other cities do not is a particular quality of neighbourliness. Bengali families in areas like Tiljala and Topsia, who have no personal stake in Chhath, routinely set out chairs on their balconies to watch the processions, and vendors who are not from the community sell the festival's specific produce as a matter of seasonal commerce. The festival has been absorbed, without being adopted, into the city's texture.

Across all three cities, the logistics of building a temporary ghat follow a similar pattern. The community association, usually a puja samiti formed along neighbourhood or state-of-origin lines, begins coordinating with the municipal body six to eight weeks before the festival. Permissions for generator sets, temporary bamboo railings, and food stalls are negotiated. Volunteers manage crowd flow during the arghya timings, which are fixed by the sun and cannot be adjusted for traffic.

The cost of attending as a vrati is modest: the raw materials for the prasad, sugarcane, seasonal fruits, thekua ingredients, coconut, run to a few hundred rupees at the ghat-side markets that spring up overnight. Getting to the ghat is the larger variable. At Juhu on Sandhya Arghya evening, autos from Andheri station quote surge rates. At ITO, the Metro is the reliable option; the Blue Line runs to ITO station, a short walk from the main ghat. At Babughat in Kolkata, the river ferry from Chandpal Ghat is both practical and, on this particular evening, unexpectedly beautiful.

The festival does not require a ticket, a booking, or a plan beyond showing up before sunset. It requires only that you understand you are a guest at someone else's home, which they have built here, from scratch, in a city that was not expecting them.

Each city's ghat is a negotiation between what Chhath demands and what the city can offer. Mumbai offers scale and a willing sea. Delhi offers the river its people came from, diminished but still there. Kolkata offers the particular grace of a city that has learned to make room. The festival arrives, builds its geography, and then, four days later, leaves the sand exactly as it found it.