Rama Navami is a spring Hindu festival that celebrates the birthday of god Rama. He is particularly important to the Vaishnavism tradition of Hinduism, as the seventh avatar of Vishnu. The festival is a part of the spring Navratri, and falls on the ninth day of the bright half (Shukla Paksha) in the Hindu calendar month of Chaitra. This typically occurs in the Gregorian months of March or April every year. Rama Navami is a relatively minor festival of Hinduism and not a national holiday, but an optional restricted holiday in India.
The day is marked by Rama Katha recitals, or reading of Rama stories. Ramayana and Mahabharat are considered Itihasa by Indian traditions. Some Vaishnava Hindus visit a temple, others pray within their home, and some participate in a bhajan or kirtan with music as a part of puja and aarti. Some devotees mark the event by taking miniature statues of the infant Rama, washing it and clothing it, then placing it in a cradle. Charitable events and community meals are also organized. The festival is an occasion for moral reflection for many Hindus. Some mark this day by vrata (fasting).
The important celebrations on this day take place at Ayodhya and Sita Samahit Sthal (Uttar Pradesh), Sitamarhi (Bihar), Janakpurdham (Nepal), Bhadrachalam (Telangana), Kodandarama Temple, Vontimitta (Andhra Pradesh) and Rameswaram (Tamil Nadu). Rathayatras, the chariot processions, also known as Shobha yatras of Rama, Sita, his brother Lakshmana and Hanuman, are taken out at several places. In Ayodhya, many take a dip in the sacred river Sarayu and then visit the Rama temple.
Rama Navami is one of the Hindu festivals that is celebrated by the Indian Hindu diaspora with roots in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and South India. The descendants of Indian indentured servants, for example, who arrived in 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 brought 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.