Sawan 2027: Start Date and the Sawan Somvar List

A colleague once asked me why her father, otherwise not particularly ritual-minded, suddenly stops eating onion and garlic and fasts every Monday for a month each year. The month was Sawan, and the answer sits in a mix of lunar calendar mechanics and a specific devotional calendar built entirely around Mondays.

Sawan 2027 dates

Sawan, the month sacred to Shiva, begins on Monday, July 19, 2027 and ends on Tuesday, August 17, 2027. This is the Shravan month by the purnimanta reckoning used across most of North India, where the lunar month runs from one full moon to the next.

Some regional calendars, notably in parts of western and southern India that follow the amanta system, count the same lunar stretch slightly differently, which is why you may see a neighbouring state’s Shravan dates offset by a few weeks from the North Indian dates given here.

Why the date moves every year

Sawan is a lunar month, not a fixed block on the Gregorian calendar. Its start is tied to a specific tithi (lunar day) beginning after a particular new moon, so the Gregorian start date drifts by roughly ten to eleven days earlier each year relative to the previous year, occasionally jumping forward when an adhik maas (leap month) is inserted into the lunar-solar calendar to keep it aligned with the seasons. 2027 does not have an adhik maas falling in this window, so Sawan runs as a single, uninterrupted month this year.

The Sawan Somvar list for 2027

Sawan Somvar, the Mondays that fall inside the month, are the specific days set aside for Shiva vrat (fasting) and evening Rudrabhishek in most North Indian traditions. In 2027 there are five:

• Sawan Somvar 1 – Monday, July 19, 2027
• Sawan Somvar 2 – Monday, July 26, 2027
• Sawan Somvar 3 – Monday, August 2, 2027
• Sawan Somvar 4 – Monday, August 9, 2027
• Sawan Somvar 5 – Monday, August 16, 2027

Five Mondays is on the higher end; some years give only four, depending purely on where July 19 (or whatever the start date happens to be that year) falls in the week relative to the month’s length.

Why Monday specifically

The Monday-Shiva association (Som-var, the day of Soma or the moon, and by extension Chandrashekhara, Shiva who wears the crescent moon) predates any single scriptural citation people usually reach for; it is a devotional convention embedded across Puranic literature rather than a single rule stated once.

What is more specifically documented is the practice built on top of it: a Sawan Somvar vrat typically involves a day-long fast broken only in the evening after visiting a Shiva temple, offering Bel patra, milk, water and honey during abhishek, and reciting the Shiva Chalisa or Om Namah Shivaya through the day.

What else falls inside Sawan 2027

Two festivals of note sit inside this window. Nag Panchami 2027 falls in the first half of the month, and Raksha Bandhan lands on the Shravan Purnima that closes it out on August 17.

Kanwar Yatra, the pilgrimage in which devotees carry Ganga water on foot to offer at Shiva temples, also runs through most of the month and peaks around the Somvars and the final days before Purnima.

The common mix-up

People often treat “Sawan” and “Shravan Somvar Vrat” as interchangeable, but the vrat is a specific practice observed on a subset of days within the broader month, not the month itself.

Someone can observe Sawan loosely, by avoiding certain foods through the month, without doing the stricter Monday fast, and the reverse is true too: strict Somvar vrat without any other dietary change through the rest of the month. Neither is more or less valid; they are different levels of the same observance.

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