Anant Chaturdashi 2026 (25 September): The 14 Knots of the Anant Sutra, Which Arm, and Udyapan

2026-08-25

Friday, 25 September 2026 is Anant Chaturdashi. The fourteen knots of the anant sutra and the fourteen lokas they stand for, which arm each person ties it on, the 14-year vrat and udyapan, and what to do with last year's thread.

Friday, 25 September 2026 is Anant Chaturdashi, and in most houses the day carries two things at once — a yellow thread tied on the arm in the morning, and a murti carried out of the door in the evening. The day as a whole, with the puja vidhi, the Kaundinya katha and the Rahu Kaal clash, is covered in our first piece on Anant Chaturdashi 2026. This one is about the thread itself: the anant sutra, its fourteen knots, and the fourteen years that come attached to them.

The day in figures

Bhadrapada Shukla Chaturdashi begins at 23:18 on 24 September and ends at 23:06 on 25 September. Every waking hour of Friday the 25th falls inside the tithi, so there is no narrow window to chase this year. At Delhi, sunrise is 06:11 and sunset 18:13. The nakshatra is Shatabhisha, the yoga Shula, the Moon in Kumbh.

Two numbers are worth holding on to. Rahu Kaal runs 10:42 to 12:12, and Abhijit Muhurta runs 11:48 to 12:36 — so the two overlap by twenty-four minutes. If you specifically want Abhijit for tying the sutra, the clean part of it is 12:12 to 12:36. If you would rather not think about it at all, do the puja in the morning, comfortably before 10:42, which is what most families do anyway. All times here are Delhi/IST; sunrise shifts by city, and there is a table for that further down.

Fourteen knots, fourteen worlds

The anant sutra is a plain thread — cotton or silk, usually turned yellow with turmeric — with fourteen knots tied into it. It is not an ornament and not an afterthought. In this vrat the thread is placed before the deity and worshipped along with him; the tying comes at the very end, after the katha and the aarti. A thread bought ready-made and slipped on without that puja has skipped the part that makes it an anant sutra.

The count of fourteen is read as the fourteen lokas — the worlds that Vishnu, as Ananta, is said to hold and pervade. In the standard Puranic reckoning they are seven above and seven below:

The vrat texts give the number and the meaning together, without an argument joining the two.

Right arm, left arm — and what the texts actually say

The convention across most of India: men tie the sutra on the right arm, women on the left. Unmarried girls usually follow the women's rule.

It is worth being straight about this. The vrat texts prescribe the arm; they do not explain it. No reason is given in the sources — not a symbolic one, not a ritual one. The explanations you will find circulating, about energy channels or pressure points or "scientific benefits", are modern additions with nothing behind them in shastra. The honest answer is parampara: it is done this way because it has been done this way. A family that has always done it the other way is not doing something wrong.

The Mahabharata frame: Yudhishthira asks, Krishna answers

The Kaundinya story most people know is the inner katha. The outer frame is the one that gives this vrat its weight.

The Pandavas are in the forest, the kingdom lost at dice, and Krishna comes to see them. Yudhishthira asks the question every vrat-keeper eventually asks: what does a man do when what he had is gone and effort has stopped working? Krishna does not offer a shortcut. He prescribes the Anant Chaturdashi vrat — Vishnu in his endless form, the fourteen-knot thread, kept every year — and then tells Yudhishthira the story of Kaundinya, the sage who threw the thread into the fire because he could not bear the thought that his wife's vrat, and not his own learning, had brought the household its wealth.

The frame comes down through the vrat-katha literature and the Bhavishya Purana rather than through every recension of the Mahabharata, so take it as the tradition's own telling of itself. What it teaches is consistent: the vrat is kept by people who have lost something and are asking, without demanding, for it to come back — and it is kept for years, not for a weekend.

Fourteen years — the shape of the vrat

Anant Chaturdashi is traditionally taken as a fourteen-year vrat. The sankalp is made once, for fourteen consecutive Anant Chaturdashis; a fresh sutra is worshipped and tied each year, and at the end of the fourteenth there is an udyapan. Fourteen is the number that runs through the whole observance:

The resonance between the fourteen knots and the fourteen years of exile gets drawn constantly, and it is worth drawing. But it is resonance, not doctrine — no text states that the knots were counted to match the exile.

Udyapan — how the vrat closes

Udyapan is done at the end of the fourteenth year, on Anant Chaturdashi itself. The usual pattern: the day's puja as normal, then a havan where the family does one, fourteen brahmins or fourteen guests fed, and daan of fourteen items — cloth, grain, a dakshina — with the sankalp formally released.

Practice varies more than most articles admit. Plenty of families never do an udyapan and simply keep the vrat for life, which is accepted; others do udyapan and then continue anyway. Neither invalidates the other. If your family has its own paddhati, follow that over anything written on the internet, this page included.

What to do with last year's sutra

Take the old thread off before the new one goes on — not after, and not both together on the same arm. After that, the accepted options:

• Flowing water. A river or a tank. This year it is easy — the old sutra can go along with the evening's visarjan.
• A bucket at home. Immerse it, then pour the water and place the thread at the base of a tree or a tulsi plant.
• Keep it in the puja ghar. Some families store each year's thread and release all of them together at the udyapan.
• Remove it after fourteen days. A smaller but real practice, in which the thread is not worn the whole year at all.

There is no single shastric rule here, and anyone who tells you there is one is overstating the case. The one point every practice agrees on is that the thread is not dropped in a dustbin.

The sunrise moves; the tithi does not

A tithi starts and ends at one moment for the entire planet. Sunrise does not. So Anant Chaturdashi is Friday, 25 September everywhere in India this year — the tithi covers the whole day — but the morning window before Rahu Kaal is a different clock in each city.

Kolkata is more than an hour ahead of Ahmedabad on sunrise. For your own city, check today's panchang and the Rahu Kaal page rather than borrowing Delhi's clock.

The visarjan on the same evening

The Ganeshotsav that began with sthapana on 14 September closes on this same date, which is why the house is busy from morning. It is called ten days after the distance from Chaturthi to Chaturdashi, though on the 2026 calendar it actually spans twelve dates. Keep the order straight: the Anant puja first, the sutra tied, and only then the murti carried out. The day-wise visarjan schedule — the one-and-a-half, three, five, seven and ten day options — is laid out in the Ganeshotsav 2026 visarjan piece.

The calendar does not pause afterwards either. Bhadrapada Purnima falls the next day, 26 September, and Pitru Paksha opens on the 27th. If the sutra feels like a small thing to fuss over in such a crowded week, remember what it is meant to be: a knot for every world, worn for fourteen years, by someone who is waiting.