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The Ledger · Culture and material

Fairs and Festivals

Rajasthan's fairs and festivals as the state itself publishes them, cut by district and by the month the calendar places them in.

Dates for the next twelve months →

Ordered by the number of records in each, largest first.

19 lists

Photographs are credited, with their source and licence, on each entry’s page.

Districts of Rajasthan documented in this recordDot size shows how much Fairs and Festivals documents in each district, not how much exists there.
Fairs and Festivals across Rajasthan. Dot size shows how much this record documents in each district, not how much exists there. Boundary: DataMeet community maps (divisions dataset, 2011 Census), CC BY 4.0.
Documented entries by district: Fairs and Festivals
DistrictListsDocumented entries
Jaipur district17
Ajmer district12
Bikaner district12
Bundi district12
Nagaur district12
Udaipur district12

One method, shared by every one of the 19 lists below.

WHAT THIS REGISTER IS. Every fair and festival on the Government of Rajasthan's published calendars, cut three ways: all of them, those of one district, and those the calendar places in one month or one season. 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. SEASONS ARE OUR GROUPING, NOT THE SOURCE'S. No government source consulted here groups its calendar by season, so the boundaries are this publication's and are stated on every page they produce: monsoon is July and August, autumn September and October, winter November to February, spring March and April, summer May and June. The months themselves are the calendar's own. SOURCE AND ITS STANDARD. The Government of Rajasthan writing about events it organises and promotes. Under this site's sourcing standard an aggregated source may back a published claim; claims resting only on one are marked "aggregated source" where they appear.

Corrections

  • 2026-09-26 — Fair dates now come from the Department of Tourism's 2024–2030 Fair & Festivals list, each shown with its source. Summaries and list rows previously repeated dates from the department's web calendar; for Kolayat those were the 2024 edition's.