Diwali’s journey to UNESCO and India’s message to a fractured world

UNESCO recognition highlights Diwali’s plural ethics amid global divisions and cultural anxieties.

- SACHCHIDANAND JOSHI

The global recognition of Diwali—Deepavali—by UNESCO is not merely an acknowledgement of a festival. It is the recognition of a civilizational philosophy that has endured for millennia: that light is not a weapon, but a shared moral responsibility. At a moment when the world stands fractured by ideological polarization, cultural absolutism, and geopolitical anxiety, India’s ancient festival of illumination arrives as a quiet but powerful counter argument.

Diwali has long been described as the victory of light over darkness, truth over falsehood, good over evil. Yet such formulations, while evocative, barely touch the depth of what the festival represents within India's historical and cultural imagination. Diwali is not a single myth frozen in time, nor a ritual confined to one belief system. It is a living archive—inscribed in stone, copper, memory, and daily practice—through which Indian society has negotiated ethics, plurality, power, economy, and community.

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, references to Diwali—variously recorded as Dipotsava, Dipavali, or Divali—appear across inscriptions documented in the Epigraphia Indica and the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. These records span regions as diverse as Karnataka, Kerala, and Rajasthan, and religious traditions ranging from Jainism to Vaishnavism.