Gudi Padwa, on the Shukla Pratipada of Chaitra, is the New Year of Maharashtra and the Konkan — the first day of the Hindu lunar year. Its sign is the gudi: a bright cloth tied to a bamboo, topped with an upturned pot, neem and mango leaves and a garland, raised at the doorway to catch the new year's first light.

The same lunar first-day is the new year across much of the Deccan — Ugadi in Karnataka and Andhra, Cheti Chand for Sindhis — and it opens Chaitra Navratri. It is one of the saadhe-teen muhurat, the three-and-a-half most auspicious moments of the year, when any new venture may begin without further reckoning.

Its first taste is deliberate: neem and jaggery eaten together, the bitter and the sweet of the year accepted in one mouthful at its very start.

Several origins meet on this day. It is held to be the day Brahma created the universe and set time itself in motion, making it the truest 'first day'. It is also read as the day Rama returned to Ayodhya after defeating Vali and Ravana, the gudi raised as a flag of victory (vijaya-dhwaj). And it recalls the victories of the Satavahana king Shalivahana, whose era — the Shaka Samvat — is counted from around this turn.

Gudi Padwa is bound to the Shaka era, counted from 78 CE and traditionally credited to Shalivahana's victory — the calendar most of the Deccan still reckons by. Under the Marathas the festival became a marker of civic pride and new beginnings, the gudi raised over homes as a standard. Its coincidence with the ripening spring and the rabi season made it, like Ugadi and Baisakhi, a new-year festival rooted equally in the almanac and the field.

The day's creation-theme rests on the Brahma Purana, which holds Chaitra Shukla Pratipada as the day Brahma began creation; the Chaitra new year and its sankalpa are set out in the dharma-nibandhas and panchanga tradition. The reading of the year's new panchanga (panchanga-shravana) — its predictions for rains, crops and rulers — is itself the scriptural rite of the day.

Chaitra Pratipada sits at the height of spring, when the rabi harvest is in and the neem is in fresh leaf and flower. The custom of eating neem with jaggery has a plain seasonal logic — neem is a blood-purifier and its bitterness is taken as the body adjusts to the coming heat — and the gudi's neem-and-mango dressing marks the same turn. Beginning the year here aligns the human calendar with the visible renewal of the land.

The gudi is told as a flag of victory and welcome. In one telling it is the vijaya-dhwaj Maharashtra raised for Rama's homecoming to Ayodhya on this day, after he defeated Ravana and, before that, freed the people of Kishkindha from the tyrant Vali. In another it honours Shalivahana, a potter's son who — the story runs — made an army of clay figures and breathed life into them to drive back an invader, and from whose victory the Shaka era begins.

Beneath both is the older sense of the day as Brahma's first: the morning creation itself began, when the wheel of time was set turning and the year, quite literally, made new.