Deepavali in Malaysia: The Festival of Lights, and Why It Isn't a Holiday in Sarawak

For one night, the lamp does the talking. Rows of small clay lamps are set out along doorways and window ledges, a floor pattern in coloured rice or powder is laid at the threshold, and a house that was dark an hour ago is outlined in flame. That is where the festival gets its name: Deepavali comes from the Sanskrit for “a row or series of lights.”

Deepavali is the Hindu festival of lights, observed each year by Malaysia’s Hindu community. In the tradition it is described as the triumph of light over darkness and of good over evil — the reason the lamps matter more than any decoration. This article describes the festival as it is kept in Malaysia, and where it interprets meaning it stays with what the tradition itself says, without adding a reading of its own.

What the day marks

Most Malaysian Hindus are of South Indian, largely Tamil, descent, and the observance here follows the Tamil calendar. On that calendar the festival falls in the month of Aippasi, roughly mid-October to mid-November, and the day commemorates the god Krishna’s defeat of the demon king Narakasura — remembered as Naraka Chaturdashi, “the day on which Narakasura was killed by Krishna.”

Because it follows a lunar calendar, the date is not fixed to the Western year. That single fact explains a lot of the rhythm of a Malaysian Deepavali — including why the official holiday schedule flags the date as provisional, a point the second half of this article returns to.

How it is kept

The morning begins early. In the Tamil observance the day opens with a ritual oil bath before dawn — a wash of purification that starts the celebration clean. Only after it do the visits and the food begin.

The customs that follow are the ones most visible to anyone living in a Malaysian neighbourhood at that time of year:

• Oil lamps — small lamps, often called diyas, lit in rows at entrances and along walls, giving the festival of lights its literal shape.
• Kolam — intricate patterns laid on the floor at the doorway using coloured rice, flour or petals, redrawn for the occasion.
• New clothes — worn on the day itself, part of the sense of renewal.
• Sweets and savouries — trays of them prepared for the household and for guests.
• Temple prayers — families visit the temple to offer prayers; the older Hindu temples in the cities draw large crowds on the day.
• Open houses — after the prayers, many Hindu families keep an open house, where relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues of every background are welcome to drop in for food and conversation.

That last custom is not unique to Deepavali. The open house — rumah terbuka — is something Malaysians share across the major festivals of each community, and Deepavali is one of the occasions when it is most widely kept. In Kuala Lumpur, the Brickfields district — long known as Little India — is the part of the city most associated with the season’s lights, bazaars and crowds.

A public holiday — in most of the country

Deepavali is a gazetted federal public holiday. On the Cabinet Division’s 2026 schedule of public holidays it is listed as Hari Deepavali, a federal holiday (marked “P” for Persekutuan), falling on Sunday, 8 November 2026.

The schedule attaches an asterisk to the entry — tertakluk kepada perubahan, “subject to change.” That is not an administrative quirk. Because Deepavali is set by the Hindu calendar, its gazetted date, like the Muslim festival dates on the same list, can be adjusted, and the government confirms it closer to the time.

Where it is observed, the effect is the ordinary one: government offices, schools and many businesses close, and for employees it counts among the paid public holidays employers must grant under Malaysia’s employment law. For the mechanics of how those paid days are counted, see public holidays in Malaysia.

The Sarawak exception

There is one place on the map where the day is not a holiday. On the Cabinet Division schedule, the checkmark that appears under every other state and Federal Territory for Deepavali is absent for Sarawak.

The reason is structural rather than about the festival itself. Sarawak keeps its own schedule of public holidays, and Deepavali does not appear on it as a state holiday. So while offices close for the day in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Penang, Johor and the rest — and in Sabah — Sarawak treats it as an ordinary working day. It is a clean example of how, on public holidays, the federal list and the state lists do not always line up.

How many people observe it

Deepavali is the year’s principal festival for Malaysia’s Hindus, who are a minority of the population. In the 2020 national census, the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) counted 2.0 million Hindus among a total population of 32.4 million — the fourth-largest reported religious affiliation, after Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. For the full census breakdown and how it was taken, see Malaysia’s population by religion.

Those numbers are concentrated: DOSM recorded Selangor as the state with the highest number of Hindus, and at district level Petaling and Klang in Selangor lead the count. It is in exactly those places — the Klang Valley and the older urban Indian neighbourhoods — that the lamps and the kolam are most visible each Aippasi.

Common mistakes

• Calling it a nationwide holiday without qualification. It is a federal public holiday observed in every state and Federal Territory except Sarawak, where it is a normal working day.
• Fixing it to a set date. Deepavali moves with the Hindu lunar calendar. The gazetted date is confirmed each year and is marked “subject to change” on the official schedule.
• Treating “Diwali” and “Deepavali” as two different festivals. They are the same festival; “Deepavali” is the form used in Malaysia and in the South Indian Tamil tradition most Malaysian Hindus follow.
• Reading the oil bath or the lamps as mere decoration. In the tradition they carry meaning — purification and the victory of light — which is why they, rather than the scale of the party, are what the day is built around.

What’s next

For the paid-leave rules that decide how a public holiday like Deepavali is counted for employees, read public holidays in Malaysia. For the census figures behind the Hindu community’s size and where it is concentrated, read Malaysia’s population by religion.

---

This article is classified as sensitive (religion, part of the 3R+1 category) under NegaraKu.md’s editorial policy. It is written to be strictly descriptive: it reports the festival’s customs and its public-holiday status as recorded in the official sources listed above, attributes statements of religious meaning to the tradition rather than asserting them, and offers no interpretation of doctrine. It is held in draft pending human sign-off before publication.