Methodology · The Fairs and Festivals of April in Rajasthan

How this list is compiled

Editorial

WHAT THIS IS. Every fair and festival the Government of Rajasthan's calendar placed in April on the edition of it read for this list. READ THE TITLE STRICTLY. This is not "the fairs held every April". Most of these are set by the Hindu calendar and drift across the Gregorian one from year to year — the department's own two pages already disagree about which month Teej and the Pushkar Fair fall in, because they were written for different years. A fair on this page may fall in the month either side of it next year, and the entry says which edition its dates came from. WHAT THE SOURCE IS. The Department of Tourism, Government of Rajasthan publishes a fairs-and-festivals calendar and a separate events list; the Rajasthan Foundation, another Government of Rajasthan body, publishes a short list of its own. This is what those three name between them. HOW COMPLETE THIS IS, STATED PLAINLY. Not very. Rajasthan holds hundreds of melas and the state keeps longer registers of them, but none of those is reachable in a readable form: the tourism department's own calendar PDF is twelve pages of scanned images with no text layer, and the Devasthan department's annual calendar is typeset in a legacy non-Unicode font that extracts as nonsense. Both were fetched and both were refused rather than guessed at. Thirty fairs and festivals is what the state publishes readably, and this is complete against that and against nothing wider. WHERE THE DATES COME FROM. The Department of Tourism's 2024–2030 Fair & Festivals list dates each fair it covers year by year, and every fair's date in this register comes from it, printed with that year's edition and its source. (A fair that is also a festival, such as Dhulandi, may carry a second date from the central government's holiday list; where the two differ, both are printed.) The department's web calendar is not used for dates: for at least one fair (Kolayat) its current entry repeats the 2024 edition's dates. A fair the list does not cover carries no date here. The list is the department's plan and can change. When it does, the new date is not written over the old one by a re-run: the import holds it back for an editor, who corrects it with a dated entry. WHERE A DISTRICT COMES FROM, AND WHY FOUR ENTRIES HAVE NONE. The calendar's place column is a tourism destination, not a district: it mixes Jaipur and Bundi with Pushkar and Mount Abu. A district is recorded only where a source names one. Four fairs get none — the department's two calendars put the Kumbhalgarh festival in Udaipur and in Rajsamand, its fairs page gives the Mount Abu summer and winter festivals a Mount Abu name beside a Udaipur place cell, and nothing published names a district for Momasar Utsav. Those four appear here and on no district list. WHAT IS ASSERTED PER ENTRY. That the Government of Rajasthan's calendar records a fair or festival of this name, at the place it gives, and — where a source names one — in that district. Nothing about attendance, antiquity or religious significance is claimed, because the source does not support one. ORDER. The calendar's own, by month and then day. Not a ranking.

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