Most of India spends Deepavali on Rama's homecoming or on Lakshmi. Tulunadu spends it on Bali.
Bali Chakravarti — Baliyendra in Tulu — is the king pushed into the underworld and permitted to return to his people once a year, and the coast treats that return as the actual occasion of the festival. On Bali Padyami, Monday 9 November 2026, the day north India keeps as Govardhan Puja, households here call him up: Poli, poli, Baliyendra — abundance, abundance, Baliyendra — shouted into the dark from the yard. A post of coconut fronds, the Baliyendra mara, is raised and lit so he can find the house.
The rest of it is a farmers' festival with nothing metaphorical about it. Cattle are washed, their horns painted, garlands put on, and they are fed poli and sweetened rice — the bullocks that pulled the year's ploughing, thanked by name. Agricultural implements are cleaned and set out for worship beside them. It is the same instinct as Maharashtra's Pola, kept on a different day and under a different story.
The wider Deepavali runs 6 to 10 November 2026, with Lakshmi Puja on Sunday 8 November. In Tulunadu the lamps go up across all of it — Tudar Parbo, the festival of lamps — but the day that belongs to this coast alone is the ninth.
This one has no venue and no organiser. It happens in houses, and it is best seen in a village where there are still cattle to garland.