Look closely at a traditional Diwali puja thali.
The diyas. The kumkum. The rice grains. The flowers. The sweets. And somewhere on that thali a small bowl or container of oil. Not decorative. Not incidental. Deliberately placed, because the oil in a diya is not separate from the ritual. It is the ritual. The flame that marks Diwali, that drives away darkness, that is offered to the deity that flame exists because of the oil beneath it.
Somewhere in the last two to three decades, that oil quietly changed. The hand-pressed sesame oil or coconut oil that fed the diyas in Indian homes for generations was replaced slowly, almost imperceptibly by paraffin-based liquid candle fuel, synthetic fragrance oils, and chemically processed alternatives that burn cleaner, last longer, and cost less.
The flame looks the same. The ritual looks the same.
But what is burning is not.
Why Oil Was Never Just a Fuel
Ancient Indian texts were precise about which oils belonged in which ritual contexts. This precision was not arbitrary. It came from a detailed understanding of what different oils produce when burned their smoke quality, their fragrance, their effect on the atmosphere of a space and from a framework that saw puja not merely as a symbolic act but as a physical interaction between the material and the sacred.
Sesame oil occupies a singular position in this framework. Across Dharmic traditions Hindu, Jain, Buddhist sesame is considered one of the most sacred offerings. The Skanda Purana lists sesame as one of the five sacred seeds. Charaka Samhita describes sesame as the most auspicious of all oils. The word til sesame appears in ritual contexts more than any other oil across the Vedic and Puranic literature.
The reason is not arbitrary reverence. Sesame oil, when burned in a diya, produces a specific quality of flame and smoke that is distinct from other oils. It burns with less soot than many alternatives. Its natural antioxidants sesamol, sesamin affect the combustion chemistry in ways that produce a cleaner burn. The fragrance released by burning sesame oil has historically been associated with purification not in a metaphorical sense, but in the practical sense of altering the air quality of an enclosed space during extended puja.
Coconut oil holds an equivalent position in South Indian, Keralan, and coastal traditions. In Kerala, the lamp the nilavilakku is considered incomplete without pure coconut oil. Temple rituals across South India specify coconut oil for lamps in the same way that North Indian traditions specify sesame. The coconut palm is itself considered sacred kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree and the oil from its fruit carries that sacred association into every lamp it feeds.
Both oils were cold-pressed in their original ritual context. Not because ancient practitioners had a position on extraction methodology. Because cold-pressed was the only kind of oil that existed. The oil poured from a clay pot into a diya in a village home two hundred years ago was extracted by hand, in a wooden press, from seeds grown in a kitchen garden. It was unrefined by definition. It was, in the language we now use, wood cold-pressed.
What Changed and What Was Lost
The industrialisation of edible oils in India happened rapidly across the mid-to-late twentieth century. Refined oils became cheaper, more widely available, and more shelf-stable than cold-pressed alternatives. The same economic logic that moved Indian kitchens from cold-pressed to refined cooking oil moved the ritual context too.
Paraffin a petroleum byproduct entered the diya in the form of ready-to-use liquid diya fuel, marketed on convenience. It burns consistently, does not spoil, and requires no preparation. What it is not is organic, plant-derived, or in any way connected to the agricultural and ritual traditions that the diya lamp represents.
Synthetic fragrance oils followed jasmine-scented, rose-scented, sandalwood-scented lamp oils that smell pleasant and photograph beautifully for social media but bear no relationship to the oils that Indian ritual tradition actually prescribed.
The loss is not only spiritual or aesthetic. It is practical. A diya fed with paraffin or synthetic fragrance oil burns with a different flame character than one fed with pure sesame or coconut oil. The combustion chemistry is different. The compounds released into the enclosed puja room during hours of Diwali lamp burning are different. Pure plant-derived oil burning in a clay diya produces the air that thousands of years of tradition intended to be breathed during prayer. What it produces is genuinely different from what a paraffin diya produces in a closed room.
The Oils of the Diwali Puja Thali Specifically
Sesame oil in the diya the North and Central Indian tradition. The traditional Diwali diya across most of North India was filled with sesame oil or a blend of sesame and mustard. Sesame specifically was associated with Lakshmi puja the invocation of abundance, prosperity, and light that is the heart of Diwali’s ritual intent. The flame fed by sesame oil was considered the appropriate offering for this puja. Not because of superstition but because sesame had already been established across centuries of practice as the oil that burns with the right quality of light.
Wood cold-pressed sesame oil for diya use should be pure single ingredient, no additives, not blended with refined alternatives. It will have the characteristic warm, nutty fragrance that distinguishes it from a neutral commercial product. That fragrance, released gently as the oil warms in the flame, is part of the sensory environment that traditional Diwali puja was designed around.
Coconut oil in the diya the South Indian and coastal tradition. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, the Diwali lamp and the daily lamp that precedes it has traditionally been fed with pure coconut oil. The flame burns clear and steady. The fragrance is subtle warmer and rounder than sesame, less assertive. In temple traditions across South India, coconut oil is the prescribed lamp fuel for Lakshmi puja specifically because of its association with abundance and purity.
The coconut oil used in ritual context should be the same quality as what you would cook with wood cold-pressed, single-ingredient, with its natural fragrance intact. The bleached, deodorised coconut oil that has no smell and no character is not what the tradition intended. The tradition intended oil that still smelled of the coconut it came from.
Sesame oil in the ritual body preparation. Diwali morning, across many Indian traditions, involves a ritual oil bath abhyanga snanam performed before sunrise. This is not a folk custom. It is described in detail across Dharmic texts as the appropriate way to begin the day of Diwali, with sesame oil applied to the body before bathing in warm water.
The logic is Ayurvedic: sesame oil is classified as warming, deeply nourishing, and specifically suited to the Vata season the dry, cool, variable-wind period that characterises post-monsoon India, which is exactly when Diwali falls. The abhyanga before the Diwali bath was a physical preparation of the body for the season as much as a ritual preparation of the person for the festival.
The practice has survived in some households, particularly in South India where it remains a consistent family tradition. In many North Indian households it has faded the concept remains but the practice has been simplified to a cursory application or dropped entirely.
Sunflower and groundnut oil in the festive kitchen. The puja thali’s oils and the kitchen’s oils were never separate categories in the traditional Indian home. The same quality of oil pure, cold-pressed, single-ingredient was used in both contexts because purity was understood as a single standard that applied to everything offered, cooked, or used in the household during an auspicious period.
The Diwali kitchen that uses wood cold-pressed groundnut oil for the chakli and cold-pressed sunflower oil for the halwa is not making a separate health decision disconnected from the ritual context. It is applying the same standard of purity to the cooking that the puja applies to the lamp. The festival understood this as a unified act the home was prepared in its entirety, not divided into the sacred room and the ordinary kitchen.
Reclaiming the Thali
The Diwali puja thali holds objects that have not changed in their essentials for centuries. The kumkum is still kumkum. The rice grains are still rice grains. The flowers are still flowers.
The oil deserves the same fidelity.
Not as a rejection of modernity or a performance of tradition for its own sake. But because the oil in the diya is doing something specific it is feeding a flame that is the central act of the festival. What that flame is made of matters. The tradition knew this. It chose sesame and coconut for reasons that held up across centuries of practice and are now beginning to be understood in the language of chemistry and combustion science as well.
A puja thali with pure wood cold-pressed sesame oil in the diya and pure wood cold-pressed coconut oil as an alternative both available from VRK Naturals, extracted without heat or chemicals, with the natural fragrance and composition that ritual use has always required is not a nostalgic gesture.
It is the thali as it was meant to be assembled.
The flame it produces is the flame the festival intended.