Champa Shashthi 2026: Khandoba, Jejuri and the Turmeric

Champa Shashthi is the sixth and last day of Khandoba's winter festival, and in 2026 it falls on Tuesday 15 December. It marks the day Khandoba is said to have killed the demon brothers Mani and Malla. What the day actually looks like is turmeric — thrown by the handful, until a hill in Pune district goes gold.

Key takeaways

• Champa Shashthi falls on Tuesday 15 December 2026, the sixth lunar day of Margashirsha's bright fortnight.
• The festival runs six tithis, not six calendar days — in 2026 they occupy seven mornings.
• Khandoba is the most widely kept kuldevata, or family deity, in Maharashtra.
• The offering is turmeric, called bhandar, and it is thrown rather than placed.

When does Champa Shashthi fall in 2026?

The festival is counted in lunar days from the start of Margashirsha's bright fortnight. Here is how those six land this year.

The first row is worth looking at twice. Pratipada this year runs through the whole night of 9 December and does not end until about 8:45 the next morning, so it touches two sunrises. A tithi that does that is called a vriddhi — a doubled day. Six lunar days therefore occupy seven mornings, and anyone counting the festival forward on a wall calendar will finish a day early.

The sixth day itself is not ambiguous: Shashthi holds through Tuesday 15 December and ends around 9:19 that night. It is the opening morning that families and temples have to fix, and they do not all fix it alike.

That Tuesday also carries Skanda Sashti, which belongs to Murugan and to a quite different part of the country — we have written about Soora Samharam at Tiruchendur separately. Two gods, one lunar day, no connection between them.

Who is Khandoba, and why would a family keep him?

Khandoba is understood as a form of Shiva — Martanda Bhairava, the sun joined to Shiva's fierce aspect. He is also Malhari or Mallari, the enemy of the demon Malla, and he travels under other names south and east: Mailara in Karnataka, Mallanna in Telangana. He is not shown as an ascetic. He rides a white horse, carries a sword, and a dog runs alongside him.

What matters more is the word kuldevata. A family deity is not chosen; it arrives with the family, and its name comes up at a wedding, a first haircut, a house-warming, whether or not anyone in the room has thought about religion in years. Khandoba is the most widely kept family deity in Maharashtra, and the list of people who keep him is the striking thing: Marathas and Kunbis, Dhangar shepherds, Ramoshis, Kolis, gardeners and tailors, Deshastha Brahmins, Jains and Lingayats, Mahar and Mang families, and some Muslim families too.

You can read that breadth in his marriages. Mhalsa, his first wife, comes from a Lingayat merchant family and is married to him in proper ritual form. Banai is a Dhangar shepherd woman, and that marriage is a love match by capture. The stories keep adding wives from further down the social scale — a tailor's daughter, a gardener's, an oil-presser's. A god assembled out of everyone who turned up is a god nobody can be refused by, and in a region where Shiva also stands in far grander settings — Trimbakeshwar and Bhimashankar are both among the twelve jyotirlingas — Khandoba is the one who ends up on a shelf in the kitchen passage.

Why is turmeric thrown instead of flowers?

Because turmeric is Khandoba's own substance. It is called bhandar, it is tipped into the air by the fistful, and at Jejuri the steps, the walls and the shoulders of everyone climbing them hold the colour long after the crowd has gone.

A warning about the word. Bhandar here is turmeric powder. Bhandara, one letter longer, is the free communal meal served at shrines all over north India. Same root, different thing on the ground; at Jejuri you will be handed the first and may well be fed the second.

Turmeric belongs to the sun, and Khandoba carries the sun in his name. It is also the least exalted thing in any Indian house. The tin lived at the front of the shelf because it was opened every day — a pinch in the dal, a paste on a bride's arms, a smear on a cut when nobody could find anything better. The smell of it on hot oil is the smell of an ordinary Tuesday. Your grandmother's thumbnail was yellow at the edge all her life and she never once remarked on it.

The gesture is not an exotic one. It is a kitchen staple thrown at a god by people who will cook with it that evening. Onions are offered too, and bel leaves — a vegetable, a weed and a spice. Nothing on that list had to be bought specially.

What actually happens at Jejuri?

Jejuri sits in Purandar taluka, roughly fifty kilometres from Pune, and the temple is built like a fort because it effectively was one. There are two: the older Kadepathar, higher and harder to reach, and the Gad-kot that most people climb to. Worship on the hill is traced to the twelfth or thirteenth century; the structure standing today is much later, built up under Maratha patronage.

Around eighteen stone arches border the climb, and something like three hundred and fifty lamp-pillars stand about the enclosure. A brass-covered tortoise roughly twenty feet across lies in the courtyard, and on a festival day it vanishes under turmeric entirely.

And there is a bell that has no business being there. After the Marathas took Vasai from the Portuguese in 1739, Chimaji Appa carried church bells away from the captured settlements and gave them to temples across Maharashtra. One of them hangs at Jejuri. A bell cast for a Catholic mission now rings for a shepherd's god, which is a fair summary of how this hill has always worked.

The cry on the steps is Yelkot yelkot jai Malhar, and on the sixth day it comes through a wall of turmeric dust and drums.

What are the six days commemorating?

Mani and Malla were brothers who took a boon from Brahma and became impossible to put down. When the sages appealed, Shiva came as Martanda Bhairava and fought them for six days. On the sixth he killed them, which is why the day is Champa Shashthi.

The ending is better than the fight. Dying, Mani offers Khandoba his own white horse and asks a boon in return: to be present in every shrine of the god who has just killed him. It is granted. Malla asks instead for the destruction of the world, and is simply beheaded. The defeated enemy is not erased — one of them is kept, by name, in every temple.

The story is set down in the Mallari Mahatmya, a Sanskrit text that presents itself as a chapter of the Brahmanda Purana but is not found in standard editions of it; scholars place its composition somewhere around 1460 to 1510, with a Marathi version following in 1585. You can read a fuller account of the deity and his sources on Wikipedia.

What is still unsettled?

Two things, and it is better to say so.

The first is that doubled tithi. Whether your family's first day is the 9th or the 10th of December depends on the panchang it follows and on local temple practice, and there is no single answer I can give you. If the calendar in your house disagrees with the one in this article by a day, the calendar in your house is the one to keep.

The second is harder. Khandoba's festivals were historically attended by vaghyas and muralis — boys dedicated to the god who identified with his dogs, and girls married to him who performed at all-night jagarans. Those songs are a real part of how the stories survived. The practice of dedicating girls is now illegal, and that is the right outcome; it does not stop the music being the reason anyone outside Maharashtra ever heard of Mani and Malla.

What survives in most houses is much smaller than any of this. A brass horse in the shrine, wiped on a Tuesday. A thumbprint of turmeric on the rider. The same tin, at the front of the shelf, where it has always been.

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