Akash deep (Diwali lantern)

A lantern hung high outside the house through the Diwali season. Akash kandil is its Marathi name; the older Sanskrit word, ākāśadīpa, is a lamp raised on a pole at Diwali in honour of Lakshmi or Vishnu.

Diwali symbols. Also called akashdeep, akash kandil, Diwali lantern, goodu deepa, kandil.

Meaning

For Diwali, Lata Guthe writes in the Marathi daily Prahaar, houses are decorated with akash kandils, clay lamps and electric lights, and in the evenings sky-lamps are hung at the doors. The name joins two words. Ākāśa is the sky or the open air, and the Monier-Williams dictionary defines the Sanskrit ākāśadīpa as a lamp or torch lit in honour of Lakshmi or Vishnu “and elevated on a pole in the air at the Dīvāli (Dīpāvali ) festival”. Kandīl, Molesworth’s Marathi dictionary of 1857 says, comes from Arabic, and its British compilers glossed it as “our glass lamps and lanterns”. Lamps hung high belong to Diwali outside Maharashtra too: in northern India they are the akash deep of the month of Kartik, and in coastal Karnataka the goodu deepa.

Origin and history

Molesworth records the older Marathi form, ākāśadivā or ākāśadīpa: “A lamp hung upon a pole or tree from the full moon of आश्विन to the full moon of कार्त्तिक”, a month that takes in Diwali.

In northern India the akash deep is still a lamp on a pole, kept through the whole month of Kartik. Sidheswar Misra, writing in the Millennium Post in 2015, describes a lamp put inside a clay pot and raised into the air on bamboo and rope, along the Ganges and in Puri, Mathura and Vrindavan. It is believed, he writes, that these lamps light the path of the souls of dead ancestors to heaven, and a legend says they were first lit for the soldiers who died in the eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata. The akash deep ends on Kartik Purnima, the full moon, which is Dev Diwali.

Is the akash kandil a Maharashtrian custom?

The name is Marathi. The lamp hung high is not only Maharashtrian: the Sanskrit dictionaries record it at Diwali, northern India keeps the akash deep through Kartik, and in Udupi and Mangaluru the goodu deepa, a bamboo frame covered in coloured paper, hangs from the roof at Deepavali. In 2019 a group of women in Moodubettu, near Malpe, were making goodu deepas in the old way, in the styles called Ashta Patti, Nakshatra, Dasha Patti and Mantapa, because cloth and plastic ones from the market were replacing them.

Sources

Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899): ākāśadīpa, Monier Monier-Williams, p. 127, Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries, University of Cologne, ākāśadīpa, p. 127
Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899): ākāśa, Monier Monier-Williams, pp. 126–127, Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries, University of Cologne, ākāśa, pp. 126–127
Molesworth, A Dictionary, Marathi and English (1857): ākāśadivā, J. T. Molesworth, 2nd edition (1857), p. 61, Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago, ākāśadivā, p. 61
Molesworth, A Dictionary, Marathi and English (1857): kandīla, J. T. Molesworth, 2nd edition (1857), p. 133, Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago, kandīla, p. 133
आली माझ्या घरी ही दिवाळी (Lata Guthe, Prahaar, 2024), Lata Guthe, Prahaar (Marathi daily, Mumbai), Kolaj weekly, 2 November 2024, Prahaar, paragraphs on preparations and customs
Kartik: lamp, lights, and faith, Sidheswar Misra, Millennium Post (opinion), 25 November 2015, Millennium Post, paragraph on Akash Deep
Udupi: Traditional style of Goodudeepas - Specialty of women from Moodubettu, Daijiworld Media Network, Udupi, 21 October 2019, Daijiworld, report

The same shape elsewhere

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research

Added October 9, 2026.

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