For half the year the sun’s rising point creeps northward along the horizon; for the other half it creeps back south. The tradition names these two halves Uttarayana, the northern course, and Dakshinayana, the southern course, and gives them a weight far beyond their astronomy. A human year, the Puranas say, is a single day and night of the devas: Uttarayana is their day, Dakshinayana their night. This is the conversion behind the divine years that the yuga figures are counted in, and it makes the sun’s annual swing the hinge between human time and the time of the gods.
The best-known story attached to it is Bhishma’s. Struck down on the tenth day of Kurukshetra and lying on a bed of arrows, Bhishma held the boon of choosing the moment of his own death, and he chose to wait, for weeks, until the sun turned north. The reason is given in the Bhagavad Gita and, before it, in the Upanishads. Those who depart in the bright path, the Gita says, by fire, by day, in the bright fortnight, in the six months of the northern course, go to Brahman and do not return; those who depart by smoke, night, the dark fortnight and the southern course reach the lunar world and come back. The Upanishads call the two routes devayana and pitriyana, the path of the gods and the path of the ancestors.
There is an astronomical wrinkle worth knowing. Uttarayana is traditionally celebrated at Makara Sankranti, around 14 January, when the sun enters the sidereal sign of Capricorn. But the sun actually turns north at the winter solstice, around 21 December. The two dates coincided roughly seventeen centuries ago; since then the precession of the equinoxes has pulled them about twenty-four days apart, because the Indian zodiac is fixed to the stars while the solstice is fixed to the seasons. Some panchangas mark the astronomical turn, most mark the sankranti, and the festival of Makara Sankranti, Pongal and Lohri keeps the older alignment alive.
Dakshinayana has its own sacred shape. It opens around the monsoon, and within it falls Chaturmasya, the four months during which Vishnu is said to sleep on the cosmic ocean, from Devshayani Ekadashi to Prabodhini Ekadashi, a season of vows, restraint and staying in one place. The year thus mirrors the kalpa in miniature: a waking half and a sleeping half, an outward day and an inward night. Bhishma’s long wait on the arrows was not superstition about lucky dates. It was a man choosing, at the end, to align his own departure with the direction he believed the whole cosmos turns toward the light.
Part 22 of 30 — Series V: What Time Is Made Of
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