This festival is significant for many Hindu women who are married because they believe that if they worship them, their married life will be happy and fulfilling. It is also known to bring their husbands good luck, wealth and prosperity. As for the single girls, they pray and worship her so that they can find a well settled man as their soul mates and life partners. Each year this festival falls in between the months of March and April of the Gregorian calendar, and according to the Hindu calendar, it falls on the first month. The celebrations go on for as long as over a fortnight. This is also a time for harvest and for worship of nature because often times, women are considered synonymous with nature because both bring life to this world. And so, for the prosperity and the fertility of women and of Mother Nature, this festival is celebrated.
The ritual for this festival goes on as follows. Most women that are religious will need to fast for as long as the celebrations go on. This does not mean complete fast. It only means that they will have to eat once in a day. With the help of clay and mud, deities of Goddess Parvati and Lord Shiva are made and decorated. Some families also make these deities with the help of wood and paint. It is a very women centric celebration and therefore the girls and the women go shopping a few days before for clothes and jewellery and dress themselves and all the younger girls of the household up. In addition to this, they apply mehndi on their hands and their legs and they believe that the depth of the colour of mehndi on their palms will determine how much their husbands will love them. The deeper the colour, the more the husband will love her. Song, dance and merriment is a major part of this event. The women folk sit around and sing songs and it is usually the older women who do so, while the younger girls either dance to this music or carry earthen pots on their heads.