Rakshya Bandhan

Raksha Bandhan
A rakhi being tied during Raksha Bandhan
Official name	Raksha Bandhan.
Also called	Rakhi, Saluno, Silono, Rakri
Observed by	Hindus
Type	Religious, cultural, secular
Date	Purnima (full moon) of Shrawan
2017 date	Monday, 7 August (Friday, 28 July in Nepal)
2018 date	Sunday, 26 August
Related to	Bhai Duj, Bhai Tika, Sama Chakeva

"Mayer's (1960: 219) observation for central India would not be inaccurate for most communities in the subcontinent:

A man's tie with his sister is accounted very close. The two have grown up together, at an age when there is no distinction made between the sexes. And later, when the sister marries, the brother is seen as her main protector, for when her father has died to whom else can she turn if there is trouble in her conjugal household.

The parental home, and after the parents' death the brother's home, often offers the only possibility of temporary or longer-term support in case of divorce, desertion, and even widowhood, especially for a woman without adult sons. Her dependence on this support is directly related to economic and social vulnerability."^[1]

 — Bina Agarwal in A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (1994), quoting Adrian C. Mayer, Caste and kinship in Central India (1960)

Raksha Bandhan, also Rakshabandhan,^[2] or Rakhi, is a popular, traditionally Hindu, annual rite which is central to a festival of the same name, and celebrated in South Asia, or among people of South Asian origin around the world. On this day, sisters of all ages tie a talisman, or amulet, called the rakhi, around the wrists of their brothers, symbolically protecting them, receiving a gift in return, and traditionally investing the brothers with a share of the responsibility of their potential care.^[1] Differing versions of the rite have been traditionally performed by Hindus in northern India,^[3][4][5] western India,^[6] Nepal,^[7] and former colonies of the British Empire to which Hindus had emigrated from India in the 19th-century. The expression "Raksha Bandhan," Sanskrit, literally, "the bond of protection, obligation, or care," is now principally applied to this ritual. Until the mid-20th-century, the expression was more commonly applied to a similar ritual in which a domestic priest ties amulets, charms, or threads on the wrists of his patrons and receives gifts of money; in some places, this is still the case.^[8][9] The sister-brother festival, on the other hand, had various names, varying with location, with some rendered as Saluno,^[10][11] Silono,^[12] and Rakri.^[8] A ritual associated with Saluno, for example, included the sisters placing shoots of barley behind the ears of their brothers.^[10] Raksha Bandhan is observed on the last day of the Hindu lunar calendar month of Shraavana, which typically falls in August.