On Kartika Purnima, Odisha offers a simple philosophical lesson: to love is to let go

On Kartika Purnima, when the full moon spills itself over the Mahanadi and its sister rivers, Odisha becomes a single long, luminous sigh. The night is at once festival and elegy: lamps drift like small stars, miniature boats glide like secret letters, and the water takes the moon’s light and keeps it as memory. Here the celestial, the domestic, and the maritime fold into one another—the moon a silent witness, the river a courier, the boat a human hope set afloat.

Moon, river, boat

The ritual is elemental and precise. Moonlight picks out the ribs of a boat; the river receives it. For a people once masterful in inter-continental coastal trade, these images are historical as well as symbolic. The Sadhabas—merchant mariners of ancient Kalinga—sailed from these deltas to Java, Sumatra, and Bali. Today, village resident and city folk alike float tiny vessels of banana stem, cork, or paper, each loaded with lamps, rice, betel leaves, and prayers. The gesture is both commemoration and enactment: a remembering of voyages and an offering for safe return.

This triad—moon, river, boat—functions like a poem. The moon illuminates longing; the river carries it; the boat makes of longing a movement. The objects are modest, but the meanings are vast.

Bali Jatra is when Sadhabas set sail on Kartika Purnima, on the Mahanadi’s banks in Cuttack is more than a fair; it is a living archive where commerce and memory meet. Stalls and performances pulse with life while ritual send-offs hold a hush of solemnity; elders intone the old refrains, children learn the careful choreography of letting go, and families perform a communal elegy for those who sail away.

The scene finds a distant cousin in Europe’s maritime pageants—most famously Venice’s Regata Storica and its “Farewell to the Fleet.” There, too, canals become theatre: crowds line the water to witness processions led by the Bucintoro, a ceremonial boat that turns civic pomp into private longing. In both places the river or canal is a stage where departure is at once spectacle and intimate sorrow, a ritual that transforms personal loss into shared meaning.

Food, fasting, memory

Kartika is a month of restraint; the culmination is a feast that tastes of both austerity and production. After Habisha, a period of simple, sattvic food, kitchens fill with the aroma of kakara pitha, arisa pitha, muan, and manda pitha—sweets that are edible memory. These offerings are practical and symbolic at once: provisions for a voyage imagined and for a soul crossing thresholds. They are gifts to the river, to the departed, and to the community that keeps the story alive.

In every home, hands craft these vessels with quiet devotion. A mother’s blessing, a child’s wonder, a lover’s ache—all sealed into the hull. As they float, voices rise in the haunting cadence of:

"ଆ କା ମା ବୋଇ – ପାନ ଗୁଆ ଥୋଇ – ପାନ ଗୁଆ ତୋର – ମାସକ ଧରମ ମୋର"

A chant as old as the tide, evoking the sacred months and the journey from monsoon to migration, from hearth to horizon.

Rivers are thresholds in Odia cosmology: not mere channels but spaces where worlds touch. On Kartika Purnima the river is both path and witness—an axis where the living commune with the absent. Bathing, boat-floating, song—each is an act of passage, a seasonal invitation to cross from presence to absence and back again.

Across Odisha’s waterways—Mahanadi, Baitarani, Rushikulya, Subarnarekha—this liminality takes different tones: the Baitarani’s weight of sacred transition, the Rushikulya’s promise of return, the Subarnarekha’s gleam of fortune and melancholy. Yet the core impulse is the same: to harness water and moonlight as allies in the human labour of farewell.

The ritual voice of Kartika Purnima is full of song. Boita Bandana and the ballads of Tapoi weave domestic sorrow and seafaring grandeur into the same refrain. Tapoi’s lament—of mostly brothers, of departure and waiting—makes personal grief a public pattern. Poets and bards, from classical to folk, have rendered this viraha—separation—into images that linger: the ocean as abyss, the boat as exile, the moon as the patient lover that links both shore and sailor.

These songs keep alive a centuries-long relationship with the sea, a relationship that once sustained commerce, culture, and kinship across the Bay of Bengal.

From the early centuries BCE through the medieval era, Kalinga commanded thriving maritime trade and power. Ports such as Tamralipti and Manikpatna connected rice, ivory, textiles, and ritual to distant markets. The Sadhabas’ voyages were economic acts wrapped in ritual: consulting tides and moons, receiving family blessings, and setting off under a sky that promised both trade and uncertainty.

Bali Jatra, non-luddite, commemorates that history without fossilising it. The fair keeps the memory dynamic—commerce turned into craft stalls, navigation into narrative, loss into a communal language of resilience.

Philosophy of farewell

Kartika Purnima is a practice in holding ambivalence. It permits gratitude and grief to coexist: the same lamp that lights a prayer for safe passage also glows in the shadow of possible loss. The festival trains the eye to see departure as a form of fidelity—an act in which love is demonstrated by release, by capable hands that set the vessel away trusting the tides, the moon, or fate.

The ritual imagines the sea not as final erasure but as a carrier of letters. Boats — modest, transient — become metaphors: the human habit of making hope material and putting it into circulation.

Today Bali Jatra is a confluence of commerce, culture, and memory. Boat races and stalls rub shoulders with quieter rites. Young people, many far removed from seafaring livelihoods, participate with a knowledge shaped as much by heritage as by imagination. The festival thus becomes a mechanism of cultural transmission: it keeps the Sadhaba story alive while allowing new meanings to accumulate.

On Kartika Purnima, Odisha offers a simple philosophical lesson: to love is to let go. The moon records the gesture; the river carries it; the boat becomes the language of faith. Lamps drown in the dark and yet the light remembered on the water endures. In the annual choreography of float and flame, the community shapes a response to absence—ritual, song, and sweet food transforming private longing into a shared poetics of return.

Let the boats drift. Let the moon mark our waiting. 

Charudutta Panigrahi is a culture impresario. He has received the Emily Dickinson award for his book Swirl and Still.

Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth