Chopda Pujan 2027: Friday 29 October, With No Evening Slot

Chopda Pujan 2027: Friday 29 October, With No Evening Slot

Chopda Pujan 2027 falls on Friday 29 October 2027, the Lakshmi Puja day of Diwali. Amavasya ends at about 7:06 PM IST, and the first night choghadiya after sunset is Roga, so the usual after-closing evening puja has no good slot this year. Plan it by daylight: 6:43 to 10:58 AM or 4:39 to 6:04 PM in Ahmedabad, with four more cities below.

If you also want to wish someone once the books are closed, two SubhSandesh numbers matter. On Raksha Bandhan 2026, our nearest festival analogue (n = 89), 49.4% of greeting pages were built on the festival day itself, and 48.3% of all shared pages are opened on a phone. This page covers the date, a five-city muhurat table, a six-step vidhi for a shop or office, and why the tax year stopped matching the chopda in 1989.

What is Chopda Pujan? The vahi-pujan described in 1901

Chopda Pujan is the worship of new account books on Diwali by trading families, mainly Gujarati and Marwari, before the first entry of the new business year. Gujarati households also call it Sharda Pujan, because Sharda, a name of Saraswati, is invoked with Lakshmi and Ganesh over the books.

The clearest old description sits in the Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IX Part I, Gujarat Population: Hindus (1901), page 82. It says bankers and merchants spend Divali, "the four last days of the Gujarat Hindu year", settling accounts, and calls the ceremony book-worship or vahi-pujan. After four o'clock on the last afternoon of the year, new books were piled on a wooden stool before Lakshmi, ringed with lamps and strewn with flowers, while a priest made saffron or kanku marks on the first page of each.

The Gazetteer also records the wall inscription that closed the rite, which it glosses as "Salutation to the Great Ganesh" and "Mother Lakshmi help us, overflow our treasure chests". It notes that Parsi merchants had their books worshipped through Hindu clerks, and that Bohra merchants took theirs to their own Mulla Saheb for an Arabic inscription. The custom was a town practice; village shopkeepers seldom kept it.

Chopda Pujan 2027 date: Friday 29 October, and the 7:06 PM cut-off

Chopda Pujan follows Lakshmi Puja, which falls on Friday 29 October 2027. Amavasya begins on the evening of Thursday 28 October, and the US Naval Observatory's one-day data for Delhi on 29 October 2027 puts the new moon at 19:06 IST, the moment Amavasya ends. Panchangs print 7:05 to 7:07 PM.

At least one ranking festival site lists Chopda Pujan 2027 on Thursday 28 October, as checked on 22 October 2026. That is the night Amavasya begins, not the Lakshmi Puja day, so check any date against a panchang for your own city. The Gujarati New Year, Bestu Varas, follows on Saturday 30 October 2027.

Chopda Pujan 2027 muhurat in 5 cities

Trading families usually time Chopda Pujan by choghadiya, which splits sunrise to sunset into eight equal parts. On a Friday the day runs Chara, Labha, Amrita, Kala, Shubha, Roga, Udvega, Chara; Chara, Labha, Amrita and Shubha are the four used for new work. The table below applies that split to sunrise and sunset from the US Naval Observatory for each city (Ahmedabad data).

The late-afternoon Chara is the slot closest to the 1901 practice of starting after four o'clock. Each part lasts 83 to 86 minutes this day, and a printed panchang may differ by a minute from rounding.

After sunset Friday's night sequence opens with Roga, which runs to about 7:39 PM in Ahmedabad and 6:36 PM in Kolkata, followed by Kala. Neither is used for new work, and Amavasya ends at 7:06 PM inside that stretch, so 2027 offers no evening choghadiya for the books.

Chopda Pujan vidhi for a shop or office: 6 steps

Each step lists what to do, who does it, when, and what it needs. Costs are our estimates for October 2026 (EST).

1. Close the old books

Total the cash book and ledger and sign off the closing balances. The owner or munim does it on Dhanteras or Choti Diwali, Wednesday 27 or Thursday 28 October 2027. You need the current books or a printed trial balance from your software, and no spend.

2. Bring home the new chopda

Buy a fresh red cloth-bound bahi or ledger, plus a new pen and an inkpot or a fresh refill. Any family member can buy it, usually on Dhanteras. A plain bound ledger costs about ₹150 to ₹600 (EST), and a pen and kumkum add ₹50 to ₹150 (EST).

3. Set the stool before the deities

Place the new books on a low wooden stool or the shop's gaadi in front of Lakshmi, Ganesh and Saraswati, with the cash box, the pen and any laptop that holds the real accounts. Ring them with lamps, as in 1901. Do it 15 to 20 minutes before your chosen choghadiya opens.

4. Mark the first page

Draw a swastik in kumkum on the first page and write Shubh on one side and Labh on the other. Many families add "Shri Ganeshaya namah" at the top and the date, 29 October 2027. The senior partner or the person who keeps the books writes it, inside the muhurat.

5. Offer the puja in the muhurat

Offer flowers, akshat, a coin and sweets to the deities and the books, light the lamp, and say a short prayer for the coming year's trade. The owner leads; a family priest is optional. Keep it within one choghadiya, about 85 minutes on 29 October 2027.

6. Make the first entry

Write one small entry, such as the opening balance or a token sale, before closing the puja. Some families then leave the books shut until the first business day of the new year. The owner or a child of the family makes it, and the cost is whatever the token sale is.

Why the business year ended at Diwali, and why the tax year does not

For the families the Gazetteer described, Diwali was the real year end: accounts were drawn up for signature over the festival's last four days, and the new books opened on the next page of the calendar. The same 1901 volume says these books were about two feet long, bound in flexible red leather, with pages left uncut on one edge so that no leaf could be removed without notice.

Further north, Marwari and other merchant families wrote their bahi-khata in a separate commercial script. Anshuman Pandey's proposal to encode the Mahajani script (Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley, 2011) describes Mahajani as a script for accounts and financial records, used for Hindi, Marwari and Punjabi until the mid-20th century. It says most surviving Mahajani records are bahi-khata account books, and that it was taught to merchant children in schools across Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

Tax law broke the link in 1987. CBDT's Circular No. 516 of 15 June 1988 explains that the Direct Tax Laws (Amendment) Act, 1987 replaced section 3 to make the financial year ending 31 March the uniform previous year for all assessees, from 1 April 1989. Before that, taxpayers could choose different previous years and change them, which the circular calls an opening for tax avoidance.

So for almost every firm today the statutory books run April to March, and the chopda is ceremonial. That is why many offices place the laptop or a printed ledger beside the red bahi: the puja marks the trader's year, while the software keeps the tax year.

When the evening puja still makes sense, and where SubhSandesh does not fit

If your family priest times Lakshmi Puja by pradosh and lagna rather than choghadiya, the books can still sit on the altar that evening. The window then runs from sunset to 7:06 PM IST: about 62 minutes in Ahmedabad, 59 in Mumbai, 87 in Delhi and 125 in Kolkata. Follow your family's rule rather than mixing systems.

SubhSandesh is not a puja tool, a panchang or an accounting app, and it has no Diwali usage data yet because the template is new. It helps with one thing after the books are closed: wishing one person properly. Across the platform pages average 11.1 views each, so a greeting tends to be reopened.

For a brother who could not make it home to the family shop, or a parent you want to thank, the interactive Diwali card on SubhSandesh lets them light a diya at their door with your tag, light a row of wish diyas, colour a rangoli until your initials glow, and open a letter from a red-and-gold shagun liffafa. It takes about five minutes and opens as a private link in any browser with no app or account.

If you run the business with a spouse or partner, Capsule, a sealed page of predictions for the year ahead suits the new account year: you both write predictions blind, it seals, and you open it together a year later. It is a year-round template, not a Diwali one.

Sources

• Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IX Part I, Gujarat Population: Hindus (Government Central Press, Bombay, 1901), pp. 82–83, public domain, read on the Internet Archive.
• US Naval Observatory, one-day sun and moon data for 29 October 2027 (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Delhi, Kolkata), retrieved 22 October 2026.
• Pandey, Anshuman (12 July 2011). Proposal to Encode the Mahajani Script in ISO/IEC 10646, L2/11-274, Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley.
• Central Board of Direct Taxes, Circular No. 516 dated 15 June 1988, explanatory notes on the Direct Tax Laws (Amendment) Act, 1987.