When is Vijayadashami (Dussehra)?

How the date is decided

Vijayadashami — Dussehra — is Ashwin Shukla Dashami, the tenth tithi of the waxing fortnight of Ashwin.

The vyapini reference that picks the civil day is aparahna: the late afternoon. Daylight is classically divided into five parts, and aparahna is the fourth of them, sitting between midday and sunset. The choice follows the rite — the shami puja, the honouring of arms and tools, and the traditional moment for beginning a journey or a venture all belong to that division.

Two other major festivals share the reference, both for the same reason — the defining act is an afternoon one: Raksha Bandhan, where the tying is done in the afternoon, and Bhai Dooj. Three observances out of the whole festival calendar use aparahna, which makes it the rarest reference here after moonrise.

Dussehra and the Navratri sequence

Dussehra closes the nine nights, but the calendar does not compute it that way. Each day in the sequence is an independent rule, and they do not share a reference:

• Sharad Navratri begins at Ashwin Shukla Pratipada, judged at sunrise
• Durga Ashtami — Ashtami, judged at midday
• Maha Navami — Navami, judged at midday
• Vijayadashami — Dashami, judged at aparahna

Because these are four rules at three different moments of the day, the sequence is not guaranteed to occupy ten consecutive dates. A tithi that begins and ends between two of the reference moments can compress the run; one that stretches across two can extend it. Almanacs describe this as a tithi being kshaya (lost) or vriddhi (doubled), and it is the single most common reason two published Navratri calendars differ.

Why the Gregorian date moves

Dussehra lands between late September and late October. Twelve lunar months are about eleven days shorter than a solar year, so the festival drifts earlier until an intercalary month resets it. Major festivals do not fire inside an Adhika month, so a leap Ashwin pushes the whole Navratri sequence into the true Ashwin that follows.

On the day

The number worth having locally is when aparahna actually starts, and that depends on your sunrise and sunset rather than on the clock. Open the panchang for your city and date for both, plus the exact end of Dashami.

If you are choosing an hour rather than a day, the muhurta scheme is a separate tool: Vijaya Muhurta explains the daily window that shares the name, and the muhurat hub covers the rest.

What we do not compute

We fix the day. We do not compute the shami puja muhurat, the Ravana dahan timings each city sets locally, or the regional Dussehra observances kept on different rules in Karnataka, Bengal and the Himalayan states. Where those differ from the date here, the cause is a different convention rather than a different calculation.