Kajari Teej: A Letter from Lucknow in Shravan
Dear Priya,
You asked me the other day, in that voice note from Birmingham, whether things back home feel different in Shravan or whether it's all in your head because you are not here. I want to write back properly, because the voice note format cannot hold what I actually want to say.
Shravan does feel different. And right now, as I am writing this, we are in the days just before Kajari Teej, and the mohalla is doing what it always does in this particular week of August — slowly, quietly filling with something that is hard to name. Not noise. Not excitement exactly. More like a held breath.
Let me try to describe it.
What Kajari Teej Actually Is
Most people outside UP and Bihar have not heard of Kajari Teej. They know Hariyali Teej in early Shravan, they know Hartalika Teej later in Bhadra — both associated with Parvati, both with fasting and married women praying for their husbands. Kajari Teej sits in between, on the third day of the Krishna Paksha in Bhadra, and it carries a different weight.
The name comes from the kajari — a style of folk song that belongs specifically to this time of year, to the monsoon, to the dark half of the month when the sky is heavy and the neem is wet and the air smells of mud and mogra both at once. These songs are not devotional in the way a bhajan is. They are something older than that. They talk about rain, about longing, about women waiting by the window for someone to return. They are sung by women, for women, and they have been passed down not through any institution but through the family — grandmother to mother to daughter, learned by ear in the summer kitchen.
In Lucknow, the celebration is centered on the moon. Women observe a day-long fast and break it only after they have seen the moon rise and offered it water and a diya. Before the moon comes up, they gather in the courtyard or the street or, in the old city, under whatever large tree the mohalla considers its own.
And they sing.
The Night of the Songs
I went last year, just to watch. You know me — I am not the type to participate, I sit at the edge of things with my notebook. But even from the edge, I want to tell you what I saw.
The women of Daliganj came out around nine in the evening, when the sky had gone dark enough for the moon to matter. Someone brought a large brass thali with a diya and flower petals and a small clay figure of Shiva — because Kajari Teej is also connected to Shiva and Parvati, the couple who are the presiding spirits of Shravan. The thali was passed around, each woman touching it briefly, and then someone began.
The first kajari came out thin and tentative, the way any song does when it is new to the night air. Then a second voice joined, and a third, and within two minutes the thing had found its feet. The songs move in cycles — a lead line, a chorus, the lead again — and the words, in Awadhi and Bhojpuri both, describe things so specific that you have to work to keep up: a bangle breaking, the sound of payal on stairs, rain on a courtyard that is somehow both welcome and lonely.
I do not know how long they sang. I think I was standing there for two hours before I looked at my phone.
When the moon finally appeared, someone pointed it out quietly, and the singing stopped. The thali came forward. Water was offered, the diya was lifted. A few women had tears in their eyes — not grief, just the particular feeling that comes when something you have been waiting for all day finally arrives.
Then someone offered sweets, the children who had been hovering at the margin rushed in, and the whole thing dissolved into tea and noise and people going home.
What the Fast Is About
Married women observe a day-long fast on Kajari Teej, praying for their husbands' long life — the same intention that runs through Hariyali Teej and Hartalika Teej. But the specifically Kajari element — the moon, the songs, the neem tree — has a texture that feels older than the formal religious framing. Like the worship and the folk tradition grew up alongside each other and simply became one thing over centuries.
The neem tree has a particular place in this ritual. It is the tree under which women gather, where the thali is placed, where the songs find their anchor. In some households the worship is done in the courtyard with a branch of neem brought inside. The tree recurs through Shravan's festivals in this way — not as decoration, but as a living presence the rituals actually need.
This tells you something about the relationship between Shravan and the world around it. The festivals of this month are not trying to separate you from the rain, the mud, the dark of the new-moon fortnight. They are asking you to hold your worship inside those things, not apart from them.
Why This One Matters
There are dozens of Teej-type festivals on the Hindu calendar. I understand why someone from outside might feel they blur together — all fasting, all moon-watching, all connected to Parvati in some way.
But Kajari Teej is one of the few that centers the sound. The songs are the practice. And the songs have a quality that I find genuinely hard to find anywhere else in Indian folk music — they are not triumphant, not petitionary, not narrative in the way a katha is. They are observational. A woman looking out at the rain and describing what she sees, and what she feels, in a voice that does not expect anything in return.
In Varanasi, the Kajari festival is especially celebrated, and it has produced some of the most recorded folk music of the Bhojpuri tradition. Thumri and Kajari both grew from the same Banaras soil, and some of the great thumri singers of the last century recorded Kajari as well — Girija Devi, Siddheshwari Devi. If you search for recordings, you will find some that were made sixty years ago and still sound like they were sung last Thursday night in a courtyard somewhere.
Before this year's Teej comes and goes, it is worth finding one of those recordings and listening with the lights off.
A Note on the Fragrance
I do not know if this is something you notice when you are not thinking about it, but Shravan changes what a room smells like in Lucknow. The monsoon brings dampness, which makes heavy fragrances heavy in a new way, and light fragrances lighter. The incense burned at home during this month tends toward the clean end — chandan, mogra, jasmine. Not the resinous winter smells. Something more like what the night air is already carrying, but a degree or two warmer and more deliberate.
On Kajari nights, several of the women I saw had a small agarbatti lit near the thali — not as the focus of the worship, just as part of the atmosphere. If you are observing from your flat in Birmingham and want to bring something of the night into the room, sandalwood is probably the closest you will get.
What You Are Missing
I want to be honest: you are missing the specific sound of that first kajari of the evening, the way the first voice goes up alone before the others come in. You cannot get that from a recording. It is a live thing, a present-tense thing, and it happens once a year.
But Priya, the point is that it will happen again. Next August and the one after that. The neem tree in Daliganj will still be there. The women who know these songs — or rather, the daughters who are learning them from their mothers right now — will still be there.
So come home when you can. Not for any occasion in particular. Just come home during Shravan sometime, and I will take you to the mohalla in the evening. We can stand at the edge together.
Your cousin,
Nikhil
