Diya (oil lamp)

Each community that lights lamps at Diwali tells its own first lighting. In the Hindu account the Hindu American Foundation gives, the people of Ayodhya lit lamps for Rama when he came back from fourteen years of exile, “Thus, the entire city looked like a row of lights.” The BBC’s version adds that it was a dark, moonless night and the lamps were put out so the king and queen could find their way.

The Jain account is in the Kalpa Sūtra. On the night Mahavira died and was liberated, the eighteen confederate kings of Kāśī and Kośala, the nine Mallakis and nine Licchavis, kept the new-moon fast day with an illumination, saying, in Hermann Jacobi’s translation of 1884, “Since the light of intelligence is gone, let us make an illumination of material matter!” Jacobi added that the Jains still mark the nirvana of Mahavira “with an illumination on the night of new moon in the month Kārttika.”

The Sikh account dates from 1619. When Guru Hargobind reached Amritsar after his release from Gwalior Fort, RE:ONLINE’s Sikh entry says, people “lit up the whole city with candles, lights and lamps.”

Written records outside the traditions begin early. Britannica finds the oldest mention of the festival in the Kamasutra of the 3rd century CE, where it is Yaksharatri, the night of the yakshas. Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī, writing his account of India, described Dibali, the new-moon day of Kārttika: “In the night they light a great number of lamps in every place so that the air is perfectly clear.” The reason he was given was that on that day Lakshmi sets free Bali, the son of Virocana, who is held prisoner in the seventh earth, and so the festival was also called Balirajya, the kingdom of Bali.