Kharchi Puja

Kharchi Puja, held annually at the Chaturdasha Devata temple in Old Agartala, is Tripura's second-largest festival after Durga Puja and one of the most theologically distinctive observances in Northeast India. Its name derives from two Tripuri (Kokborok) words, "khar" meaning sin and "chi" meaning cleaning, and the festival is understood fundamentally as a ritual cleansing of accumulated sin through the collective worship of the Chaturdasha Devata, the fourteen guardian deities of the Tripuri people. The fourteen deities honoured are Shiva, Durga, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik, Ganesha, Brahma, Abadhi (the water god), Chandra, Ganga, Agni, Kamdev, and Himadri (the Himalayas), a pantheon that blends major Hindu deities with nature-focused tribal figures, reflecting the layered religious history of the Tripuri royal court, which gradually absorbed Hindu worship while retaining distinct indigenous elements. The temple that houses their images was built in 1761 under King Krishna Manikya specifically to enshrine these fourteen guardian deities. The festival falls on Shukla Ashtami, the eighth day of the lunar month of Ashadha (typically June-July), and its central rite is a riverside procession: the images of the fourteen deities are carried by chanting devotees from the temple to the Saidra river, ceremonially bathed in its waters, and then returned to the temple, an act understood to renew and purify both the deities' images and the community's standing before them. As a former royal state cult that has since become a broadly public festival, Kharchi Puja draws large crowds from across Tripura to Old Agartala each year, and its combination of royal patronage history, indigenous fourteen-deity worship, and a distinctive river-bathing ritual makes it one of the clearest examples in Northeast India of a princely-state religious tradition surviving intact into contemporary public life.