Mithuna Sankranti 2028: Date, Rituals & Significance

Krishna Ashtami runs 14 Jun, 20:46 → 15 Jun, 23:04.

Through Raja Parba no ploughing or digging is done; unmarried girls swing on rope swings hung from trees, wear new clothes, and eat poda pitha. On the third day, Vasumati Snana, a grinding stone standing for Bhudevi is bathed and adorned. The festival marks the coming of the first monsoon rains onto the parched land.

Raja Parba is an agrarian earth-cult festival of coastal and western Odisha, described in nineteenth-century gazetteers; 'Raja' derives from 'rajas', the menstrual flow. The three days are Pahili Raja, Raja Sankranti and Basi Raja, followed by Vasumati Snana.

Source: Odisha gazetteers — Raja Parba

The Raja festival is recorded in the Puri and Cuttack district gazetteers as a women's and girls' festival of rest and play; the personification of the earth as a menstruating goddess links it to the wider Ambubachi observance of eastern India at the same season.

• Odisha gazetteers — Raja Parba
• Wikipedia — Raja Parba

1. The Sun enters Gemini in mid-June, as the monsoon sets in.
2. In Odisha it is the main day of Raja Parba, when the earth is honoured as a woman resting before the rains: girls wear new clothes, swing on rope swings and do no work, and ploughing stops.
3. Elsewhere the day is kept with a bath and daan, and prayers for good rains.

• Odisha. Raja Parba — three days of rest for the earth, rope swings, poda pitha, and Vasumati Snana of the grinding-stone Bhudevi on the fourth day.
• Assam. Ambubachi at Kamakhya falls in the same season — the temple closes for three days for the goddess's cycle.
• Tamil Nadu. The first of Ani; Ani Thirumanjanam at the Nataraja temple, Chidambaram.

• Poda pitha — The baked rice-and-coconut cake of Raja in Odisha.
• Paan — Raja paan is chewed by the swinging girls.

Mithuna Sankranti falls on Thursday, 15 June 2028. Sun's sidereal ingress into Gemini (Mithuna); Raja Parba begins in Odisha.

at sunrise

Mithuna Sankranti is the moment the Sun enters sidereal Gemini (Lahiri), near 15 June — close to the June solstice, when the Sun is at its northernmost and the monsoon reaches eastern India. The sidereal date barely moves in the Gregorian calendar.

Fixed to a solar ingress — the Gregorian date barely moves (a day either way as the ingress instant drifts against the civil day).