सनातन पुस्तकालय Sanatan Cultural Library

Of Assam's three Bihus, Kati is the one without a feast. Kongali means poor, scanty — and the name describes the season: by mid-October the old harvest is eaten, the granaries stand nearly empty, and the new paddy is still green in the fields, its fate undecided. There is nothing yet to celebrate, everything to pray for. So Kati Bihu turned inward and became a festival of lamps and quiet petition rather than of dance and plenty. Its mood is the counterpoint that gives the other two Bihus their meaning: the anxious hush before Magh Bihu's abundance. Tradition holds the day sacred to the tulasi plant and to Lakshmi as the deity of the crop — the household's plea that the goddess of plenty not pass them by in the critical weeks while the grain fills.

On the sankranti evening that opens the month of Kati, the household cleans the courtyard and the tulasi is freshly planted or trimmed on its earthen platform, the tulasi bheti. As dusk falls, earthen lamps — saki — are lit at the foot of the tulasi, at the granary door, at the gateway and in the garden, and the family offers prayers for the family's wellbeing and the ripening paddy. In the fields, cultivators light lamps along the bunds; the most evocative is the akash banti, the "sky lamp" raised on the tip of a tall bamboo pole, which tradition explains variously — to guide the souls of ancestors, and to draw insects away from the tender crop, a piece of practical wisdom folded into piety. Some farmers whirl a bamboo stem and recite traditional formulas to ward pests and the evil eye from the field. Food is deliberately simple; the month of Kati keeps up the lamp at the tulasi each evening.

Kati Bihu is the easiest Bihu to keep faithfully in a Canadian home, precisely because it asks for so little: a clean threshold, a tulasi plant and an evening lamp. Many Assamese and other Indian households in Ottawa already keep a potted tulasi indoors — by mid-October it must come in from the cold in any case — and lighting a saki or diya beside it at dusk on the Kartika sankranti, with a simple prayer to Lakshmi for the household's sustenance, is the whole heart of the festival. Families without tulasi light the lamp at the kitchen or altar. The evening is also a natural moment to remember ancestors, echoing the sky-lamp's older meaning, and to teach children why one of Assam's three Bihus celebrates scarcity rather than plenty. Check the sankranti dates on this site's calendar; the same season leads into Kartika's lamp-lighting month observed across Hindu traditions.