Hariyali Teej: the green one, and what sindhara is really for

Somewhere in Sawan a box turns up. Ghevar, gujiya, maybe feni, a set of green bangles, and something to wear. Your mother sent it, and if you are recently married it will be the first year it happens, and nobody will have explained that it was coming.

That box is sindhara, and it belongs to this Teej. Not the next one, not the one after. Which matters more than it sounds, because there are three festivals called Teej inside about a month and a half, and the amount of confusion between them is genuinely large.

This page is Hariyali: the green one, the one with the jhoola, and the only one of the three that is properly old.

Hariyali Teej 2026 was Saturday 15 August. Shravana shukla tritiya, tithi from 18:47 on 14 August to 17:29 on 15 August. It is also called Sawan Teej, Chhoti Teej and Sindhara Teej.

Why this is the old one

P. V. Kane catalogued around eleven hundred vratas and named the text each came from. Hariyali is in there, as Madhusrava, on Shravana shukla tritiya, and he sources it to Hemadri, which is thirteenth century. He also notes it was well known in Gurjaradesh, Gujarat.

The other two do not do nearly as well. Hartalika is missing from the twelfth and thirteenth century compendia entirely and only turns up in digests from the 1600s. Kajari gets one line in a legal digest of 1612, no Purana at all, and that digest says the puja is to Vishnu.

So if somebody tells you the Teej cycle is ancient, the honest version is that one of the three reaches the thirteenth century and the other two are early modern. Hariyali is the one with the receipts.

James Tod is worth reading on it too, from 1832, because he watched it. He calls it the Tij, says it is sacred to Parvati as the day she was reunited with Shiva after her austerities, and then describes Jaipur: red clothes worn by everybody, the Raja presenting red cloth to all his chiefs, and an image of Parvati richly dressed and carried on a throne by women singing, with the prince and his nobles walking behind.

And one line that has not changed in two hundred years: on this day, fathers present red garments and stuffs to their daughters.

The green

Hariyali means green, and it is not decorative. Sawan is when the rain has finally come and everything that was dust in June is green again. You are wearing the weather.

So: a green saree or suit, green bangles, a green bindi, mehendi. Bandhani and leheriya both belong here, leheriya especially, because those diagonal stripes are meant to be rain. In Jaipur the leheriya odhni is the Teej thing and you will see it on half the city.

Green is the colour of the month rather than of the goddess, which is why Tod finds everybody in red at the Jaipur procession while the women are in green. Both are correct. The red is for Parvati and the green is for Sawan.

Glass bangles specifically, and a lot of them, and this is the one part where people get quietly competitive. Chudi ka set poora hona chahiye.

The jhoola

A swing is hung from a tree or a beam, decorated with flowers, and women take turns on it and sing. It is the single most photographed thing about this festival and the least explained.

What it is doing there: Sawan is the month a married daughter traditionally goes back to her mayka, and the jhoola is what she does when she gets there, with the women she grew up with. The songs that go with it are about exactly that. Coming home, and the fact that it is temporary.

In Punjab the same festival is Teeyan and it runs for days rather than one, with giddha rather than swing songs, and it is explicitly the fortnight the daughters come back.

Sindhara

The box. It goes from a mother to her married daughter, in Sawan, at her sasural, and it is the reason Hariyali Teej is also called Sindhara Teej.

What is in it, broadly: ghevar above all, then gujiya, feni, mathri. Green bangles. Something to wear, usually a saree or a suit. Mehendi. And cash, because there is always cash.

Ghevar is the load-bearing item and it is genuinely seasonal, made and sold for these few weeks and then gone. In a lot of families the arrival of ghevar is how you find out Teej is close.

Who sends it varies more than the lists admit. The straightforward version is mother to daughter. In many households it is the saas who sends it to her daughter-in-law, or the elder women of the house between them, and in some it goes both ways. Jaisa aapke ghar mein chalta hai, wahi theek hai.

The amounts and who gives what are written up separately in the Teej sindhara guide rather than repeated here.

The fast, and whether men keep it

Married women fast for their husbands. Unmarried girls fast for a good one. That formulation is identical everywhere and it is worth noticing how little it varies, because almost nothing else about these festivals is that consistent.

Nirjala in the strictest version, phalahari in most houses, and plenty of people keep it on water. There is no scriptural ruling to appeal to, so the rule in practice is whatever your family does.

Do husbands fast? Not traditionally, and there is no record of it anywhere we looked. What is recorded is that they were expected to be present. Tod, writing about the Bundi Teej, says it was the day on which a Rajput must visit his wife, and the vassals were sent home from court to keep it.

That said, plenty of couples now do it together, the same way karwa chauth has changed. Nothing in the festival forbids it. If you are the husband and you want to keep it, keep it, and expect exactly one relative to have an opinion about that.

The confusion, and how to end it

Three festivals, all called Teej, inside about six weeks. Here they are side by side.

Hindi Wikipedia's own Hariyali Teej article says that in eastern Uttar Pradesh the festival is celebrated as Kajali Teej, which collapses two festivals a fortnight apart into one. That is the sort of thing that then gets copied everywhere.

The clean way to hold it: Hariyali is in Sawan and it is green. Kajari is three days after Rakhi and it is a fast that ends on the moon. Hartalika is a fortnight after Kajari and it is the hard one.

Rajasthan splits along the same line, royally. Jaipur keeps Hariyali, with the Parvati procession Tod watched. Bundi keeps Kajli, a fortnight later, with its own. Two Teej processions, two cities, and an argument about which is the real one that has been running for two centuries.

What people forget it also was

Teej was a fair, and it was where young unmarried women went.

Tod records the fair of the Tij at Pipar in Marwar, and the reason he records it is a raid in 1516 in which a hundred and forty of the maidens of Maru were carried off from it. Marwari bards were still singing that three hundred years later, in his hearing.

William Crooke, writing in 1896 about Saharanpur, describes something different again and much smaller: at the rainy-season Tij the girls put on their best clothes, go to a tank, drop offerings in honour of Khwaja Khizr, then split into two parties and stage a mock wedding around a tulsi or a pipal, teasing each other throughout.

A children's game with an offering to a Muslim saint in the middle of it, filed under Teej. Which is a useful reminder that a festival is not one thing that has been slowly forgotten. It is many things, and different ones survive in different places.

If you are far from home

Sindhara is a box that arrives. The whole point of it is that it comes from your mother's house to the house you married into, and the distance is built into the gesture.

So the version that works from another city, or another country, is not complicated. Send the ghevar if you can get it sent. Send the bangles. And send the money as its own thing rather than folded into the mithai order, because the mithai is a present and the cash is shagun and they are doing different jobs.

Ends in a one, as always. ₹501 on its own, or ₹1,100 with the coin on the envelope making it ₹1,101.

Questions people ask