Methodology · The Winter Fairs and Festivals of Rajasthan

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Editorial

WHAT THIS IS. Every fair and festival the Government of Rajasthan's calendar placed in November to February. THE SEASON IS OURS, THE MONTHS ARE THE SOURCE'S. No government source consulted here groups its calendar by season, so the boundary is this publication's and is stated rather than implied: winter means November to February on this site. The months each fair falls in are the calendar's own, and are shown against every entry. READ THE TITLE STRICTLY. Most of these are set by the Hindu calendar and drift across the Gregorian one from year to year, so a fair at the edge of a season may sit in the next one another year. 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. THE DATES ARE ONE EDITION'S, NOT THE FESTIVAL'S. Every date here is what the calendar was advertising when it was read. These fairs move: eleven of the thirty carry the department's own words placing them by the Hindu calendar — "the month of Kartik (October-November)", "held on the full moon day of February or Magh Shukla Purnima", "the Shukla Paksha of the Phalgun month" — and the department's two pages disagree with each other about when the same fair falls, because they were written for different years. Nothing on this site should be read as saying when a fair will next be held. 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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