While Rama's return to Ayodhya provides the most widely known narrative explanation for Diwali in North Indian Hindu tradition, the festival as actually observed across the Indian subcontinent draws on several distinct and regionally varying narrative traditions rather than resting on a single universal origin story. In parts of South India, the same festival period is more strongly associated with Krishna's defeat of the demon Narakasura, commemorated as Naraka Chaturdashi. Other regional traditions connect the festival period to different deities and narratives associated with prosperity, particularly the goddess Lakshmi, whose worship on Diwali night is close to universal across Hindu communities regardless of which narrative frame a given region emphasizes.
Diwali is also observed, with entirely distinct theological content, by Jain communities, who commemorate on the same general date Mahavira's own final liberation, and by Sikh communities, who mark Bandi Chhor Divas, the release of Guru Hargobind from imprisonment, a coincidence of shared regional calendar timing rather than a shared narrative origin across the three traditions.
This layered, regionally plural character is typical of major festivals across South Asian religious practice, where a widely shared observance can carry genuinely different, non-competing narrative meanings depending on region, sect and tradition, all coexisting under a single broadly recognized festival name.