Diya (lamp)
oil or ghee based candle from South Asia
A diya, diyo, deya, deeya, dia, divaa, deepa, deepam, deep, deepak or saaki (Sanskrit: दीपम्, romanized: Dīpam, Hindi: दीया, romanized: Dīyā) is an oil lamp made from clay, brass or silver with a cotton wick dipped in oil or ghee. These lamps are commonly used in the Indian subcontinent and they hold sacred prominence in Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain prayers as well as religious rituals, ceremonies and festivals including Diwali.
The diya lamp was added to Unicode as U+1FA94 🪔 DIYA LAMP in 2019.
Traditional use
Diyas are symbolically lit during prayers, rituals, and ceremonies; they are permanent fixtures in homes and temples. The warm, bright glow emitted from a diya is considered auspicious, regarded to represent enlightenment, prosperity, knowledge and wisdom. Diyas represent the triumph of light over dark, good over evil with the most notable example of this being on the day of Diwali. Diwali is celebrated every year to celebrate the triumph of good over evil as told in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Diwali marks the day Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana returned home to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile, after the defeat of Ravana. According to tradition, to welcome Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana home, the citizens of Ayodhya are said to have lit up the streets with diyas. They are regarded to be associated with Lakshmi in Hindu iconography and worship.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Diya (lamp)” as oil or ghee based candle from South Asia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as oil or ghee based candle from South Asia. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1231792. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Diya (lamp)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.