Why Is Dandiya Played During Navratri? What Scholars Actually Say

Why Is Dandiya Played During Navratri? What Scholars Actually Say

Why is dandiya played during Navratri? Because in Gujarat the nine nights of Navratri are spent dancing for the goddess Amba, the regional name for Durga, and dandiya raas is the paired stick dance that closes each night after the garba circles and the aarti. Two further reasons are popular belief rather than documented history: that the clashing sticks are Durga's swords in her nine-day battle with the buffalo demon Mahishasura, and that the dance descends from Krishna's raas with the gopis.

That split matters, because most pages answering this question state both stories as fact. The researcher who wrote the most detailed open-access account of these dances, Maya Parmar in her 2013 Leeds doctoral thesis, notes plainly that "the historical scholarship on Navratri is lacking". This page sets out what is documented, what is belief, when in the night dandiya is played, and how a Gujarati devotional dance reached Mumbai stages and British leisure centres.

What is dandiya raas, and how is it different from garba?

Dandiya raas is a paired dance from Gujarat in which dancers face a partner and strike short sticks, called dandiya, to a rhythm. Garba is the circle dance, originally danced only by women around a centrepiece, with claps instead of sticks.

The details are specific. In Parmar's 2013 thesis, the sticks are twelve to eighteen inches long, the dancers form two facing lines, and because the dance works in pairs the group "must contain an even number". Quoting the dance ethnographer Ann David, she describes an eight-beat cycle called kaherva: hit your own sticks, hit right sticks with your partner, then left, turn, and move on two places to a new partner.

Garba's centrepiece is the garbo. Parmar records, citing Kapila Vatsyayan's 1976 Traditions of Indian Folk Dance, that this was "often a clay vase or pitcher that is said to have symbolised the womb", the lamp-in-a-pot that gives the dance its name. Today, she notes, men also dance in the concentric garba circles, which move around a murti of the goddess.

One word explains the phrasing of the question. In Gujarati you do not dance garba, you play it: the verb is રમવું (ramvu), "to play", and Parmar follows David in reading it as the informal, pleasure-oriented side of the practice. That is why people ask why dandiya is "played".

Why Navratri specifically: the goddess Amba in Gujarat

Dandiya belongs to Navratri because the festival is the goddess's festival, and in Gujarat she is worshipped by dancing. Parmar describes the circles moving "around a murti of Durga, or Amba as Gujaratis might recognise her", and Ann David's 2014 chapter calls Navratri "a pan-Indian festival in praise of the feminine power of the divine".

The festival's length carries the mythology. Parmar summarises the Hindu account: Durga fought Mahishasura for nine days and killed him on the tenth, the same tenth day on which Ram is said to have defeated Ravan, which is why the festival is also associated with Ram. She adds Vatsyayan's point that although these dances are traced to mythology, they are "also connected to the agricultural cycle", which fits a festival held in the lunar month of Ashwin, in the autumn season of Sharad.

The dates move every year with the lunar calendar. Sharad Navratri 2026 runs from 11 to 19 October, with Vijayadashami on 20 October in Delhi and North India but 21 October in Bengal and Mysuru; according to Drik Panchang's 2027 calendar for New Delhi, the 2027 festival runs from 30 September to 8 October, with Vijayadashami on 9 October. Every one of those nine nights is a dandiya night.

Documented fact or popular belief? The sword and Krishna stories

The table separates what researchers record from what is repeated as tradition. Every row cites the page or date where the claim appears.

The takeaway: the order of the night and the shape of the dance are documented; the sword and Krishna meanings are the meanings people give it. Both stories are real beliefs, held sincerely, but neither is a recorded origin.

The two stories also attach to different dances. The battle reading fits the sticks of dandiya, and the raas reading fits the playful, partner-swapping form, which is why people describe garba as worship and dandiya as celebration.

When is dandiya played within a Navratri night?

Dandiya usually comes last. Describing a night at Harrow Leisure Centre in October 2010, Parmar writes that "the customary format prevailed: garba began the evening, followed by aarti, another set of garba and finally dandiya", and she calls that format "more or less recognisable".

The tempo rises through the night. Parmar notes that the music "will often increase in tempo as the dance progresses", that during dandiya the steps became faster with turns and spins, and that individual dances might last "anything from ten minutes to almost an hour", with players joining and leaving as they wish.

Exact clock times depend on the organiser, so the aarti announcement is the practical marker. If you are meeting a dandiya partner, arrive for the garba and stay past the aarti; the sticks come out after it.

How did dandiya spread beyond Gujarat?

It spread in three waves that are documented, each turning a devotional practice into a public event. The first was migration; the second was the 1990s Indian pop boom; the third was the big managed hall.

The diaspora. Ann David's 2014 chapter on garba and raas in the UK studies a British Gujarati community most of whom "forcibly migrated to the United Kingdom from East Africa in the 1970s" after Idi Amin expelled non-African people from Uganda. She records the dances at religious festivals and also at parties, weddings, competitive staged displays and in Bollywood films.

Mumbai's stage nights. In a 2017 essay for the sound-studies blog Sounding Out!, Pavitra Sundar traces Falguni Pathak's rise to the 1990s music boom carried by satellite television. Pathak, called the "Queen of Dandiya", is "the most sought-after vocalist for Navratri festivities in Mumbai each year", singing traditional Gujarati songs on each of the nine nights.

The big managed hall. At Harrow in 2010, Parmar found metal railings at the entrance, security guards and marshals controlling the dance floor around the murti. The murti still stood at the centre, but the floor around it was now managed like any large public event.

Something is lost on the way. Parmar notes that the womb symbolism of the garbo "has been lost", which she reads as a clash of the sacred and the profane; at Harrow she watched a dandiya set turn into the Macarena.

Is dandiya a religious act or a party now?

It is both, and the scholars do not pretend otherwise. Parmar distinguishes "Navratri as a Hindu festival that is innately spiritual" from "the many forms of dance that are inserted into that space", and she treats the play itself as socio-religious rather than either one.

For a reader the useful version is this. The reason dandiya is played during Navratri is devotional and documented: it is how Gujarat keeps the goddess's nine nights. The reason a stage night in Mumbai or a hall in Harrow is full is social, and the 1972 expulsion from Uganda, satellite-television pop and large managed venues are its documented causes.

Asking one person to be your dandiya partner

Dandiya needs an even number, and that pairing logic is why "dandiya partner" became a thing people ask someone to be. If there is one person you want opposite you in the line, the Be My Dandiya Partner invitation is built around this festival: nine short lines, one for each night, appear as the recipient lights nine diyas round a garbo, then a dhol-beat game, the colour they will twirl in, and a 1080×1920 Dandiya Pass sized for an Instagram Story.

The numbers behind sending it are platform-wide, not Navratri data. Across SubhSandesh, 48.3% of shared pages are opened on a phone and 38.5% of creators password-protect their page before sharing it. The nearest festival measurement is Raksha Bandhan 2026, where 49.4% of 89 pages were built on the festival day itself and the median lead time was 0 days; with nine nights, a page made on night two still covers seven more.

Where it is the wrong tool: it is a one-to-one invitation, so for a society garba, an office night or a family WhatsApp group, a plain message works better. The page interface is in English, and it does not sell passes or find anyone a partner. If you will see the person at the garba tonight, ask them there. If the plan is dinner after the last night rather than the dance itself, an invitation with a countdown to the date fits better, and the full template library covers other occasions.

Sources

• Parmar, M. (March 2013). Reading the Double Diaspora: Cultural Representations of Gujarati East Africans in Britain. PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Open access; the Navratri chapter was read in full.
• David, A. R. (2014). "Embodied Traditions: Gujarati (Dance) Practices of Garba and Raas in the UK context". In Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–36. Abstract read.
• Sundar, P. (23 October 2017). "The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak". Sounding Out!
• Drik Panchang, Shardiya Navratri calendar 2027, New Delhi (undated; checked 12 October 2026).