Nav Vilas Aarambh

Nav Vilas is how Pushtimarg keeps the nine days of Navratri: not as a fast dedicated to the goddess in the wider sense, but as the Manorath (devotional celebration) of the Vrajanganas, the nine principal sakhis, and their milan (union) with Thakorji. Each of the nine days, from Ashwin Sud Ekam to Navmi, Thakorji performs a particular leela with a particular sakhi at her own leela-sthali, and the sakhi's vastra colour and the samagri offered that day change to match her.

The seva begins with Ankur Ropan and Ghat Sthapan: ten clay pots are prepared and jav (barley) seeds sown in them on the first day. Their daily growth, watched and tended across the nine days, is read as the growth of Navdha Bhakti, the nine forms of devotion, ripening day by day toward its fullest form.

Pushtimarg's Navratri is not borrowed from the wider festival so much as it is re-read entirely through its own lens: nine days that elsewhere honour the goddess become, here, nine days of the sakhis' own devotion to Krishna, each with her own colour, her own leela, her own place. It is a quiet but telling example of how thoroughly the sampradaya reframes a shared Hindu calendar through Krishna-bhakti.

The growing jav gives a Vaishnav something to watch, literally, as the days pass: devotion is not claimed to be complete on day one, it grows, the way the little shoots in the pots visibly do, and by Navmi it has ripened into what the tradition calls Prem Lakshana Bhakti — devotion marked by love. What was planted on the first day of Nav Vilas is what gets offered, grown, on Vijayadashami.