When is Navratri in Dallas and where are the garba nights?
Navratri in Dallas–Fort Worth: how the season works
Dallas–Fort Worth runs one of the larger Navratri seasons in the United States, spread across temples, community halls and ticketed venues. The way it is organised is not obvious from outside.
Nine nights, and why the dates move
Navratri means nine nights, and it honours the goddess in her several forms. The dates follow a lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian one, which is why the festival lands in September in some years and October in others, and why a date you remember from last year will not be the date this year.
For that reason this page does not list dates for a future year. Anyone who publishes them confidently a long way out is guessing. The listings on this site carry the actual date of each event as its organiser set it.
The two kinds of night
Broadly there are temple and community nights, and ticketed artist nights, and they are different evenings.
Temple and community nights are usually free or low-cost, run across most or all of the nine nights, draw a wide age range and are centred on the religious observance as much as the dancing. Ticketed artist nights bring a named singer and a live band, often from India, usually run one or two nights, and are organised around the performance.
Many people in DFW go to both, and the two are not in competition — the community nights are the season and the artist nights are the events within it.
Where it happens
The metroplex spreads the season across several cities rather than concentrating it in Dallas proper. Frisco, Irving, Plano, Allen, Richardson and Carrollton all host nights, and the venue for a large ticketed event is frequently a suburban event centre rather than a downtown hall.
This matters when you are searching. An event advertised as "Dallas" may well be in Frisco, half an hour north, and listings differ on which name they use. It is always worth reading the venue address rather than the city in the title.
Finding the night you want
If you want the big artist nights, search by the performer. If you want somewhere to dance on a particular evening, search by city and date. If you are going as a family, check the finish time before anything else — the serious dancing starts late.