Ram Navami 2020 | Why is it celebrated? | Its Significance | Do people celebrate it Outside India?

Ram Navami

Today, on 2nd April 2020 is the ninth and the final day of the navratari. On the last day of navratri is ram navami. Ram navami is the birthday of Lord Rama. He is a hindu god, who is believed to be the seventh avatar of Lord Vishnu. The festival celebrates the descent of Vishnu as Shri Rama avatar, through his birth to King Dasharatha and Queen Kausalya in Ayodhya. In the festival people take a dip in the river Sarayu. Also people go to temples and pray, pray at home and some people take part in in a bhajan or kirtan with music as a part of puja and aarti. People also vow vratas(fast) on the day.

Significance of Ram Navami

The Significance of the Festival is indicates the victory of goodness on evil and establishment of the Dharma to beat the Adharma. Ram Navami festival celebration starts with the Jal (water) offering in the early morning to the God Sun (A Deity) to get blessings from him. People also beliefs that the God Sun as an ancestor of the Lord Rama.

Outside India

Rama Navami is one of the Hindu festivals that is celebrated by the Indian Hindu diaspora with roots in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The descendants of Indian indentured servants/slaves who were forced to leave India by engineering a famine in these places by the then British rule, and then promised for job were shipped to colonial South Africa before 1910 to work in British owned plantations and mines, thereafter lived through the South African Apartheid regime, continued to celebrate Ram Navami by reciting Ramayana, and by singing bhajans of Tyagaraja and Bhadrachala Ramdas. The tradition continues in contemporary times in the Hindu temples of Durban every year.

Similarly in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, other Caribbean countries, Mauritius, Malaysia, Singapore, and many other countries Hindu descendants of colonial era indentured workers/slaves forced by the British government from India have continued to observe Ram Navami along with their other traditional festivals. It is also celebrated by Hindus in Fiji, and those Fiji Hindus who have re-migrated elsewhere.

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