The History of Fireworks in India
How fireworks reached India and evolved — from gunpowder's arrival and Mughal-era displays to the rise of Sivakasi as the country's fireworks capital.
The History of Fireworks in India
Last verified: 2026.
Gunpowder reached India centuries before anyone burst a cracker for Diwali, and the sport of lighting it for spectacle grew up slowly, through royal courts, colonial trading houses, and finally one Tamil Nadu match town, rather than arriving as a single invention.
The short answer:
- The earliest Indian references to gunpowder and pyrotechnic display are medieval, not ancient: a 1258 chronicle account and a documented 1443 eyewitness report from the Vijayanagara empire, well before any Mughal emperor.
- Fireworks became a genuine Mughal court art form under Akbar and especially Jahangir, whose own memoir records a 1610 display in Lahore run by Chinese craftsmen.
- Aurangzeb tried to ban fireworks empire-wide in 1667 (a farmaan that survives in the Bikaner state archives), and the ban did not stick long-term.
- Organised Indian manufacturing began in colonial-era Calcutta in the 19th century; it took independence and a Tamil Nadu match town's pivot in 1925 to build the industry India has today.
- Sivakasi, founded on a matchstick trade brought back from Calcutta, now supplies close to 90% of India's fireworks from a base that didn't exist until the 20th century.
- A widely repeated claim that ancient Sanskrit texts describe gunpowder formulas is contested by historians on textual-dating grounds and is not treated as settled fact on this page.
On this page
On this page
This guide sits in our crackers guides library. For the specific story of India's modern fireworks capital, read the history of Sivakasi fireworks and the sourced Sivakasi industry statistics. For the science behind the spectacle, see the chemistry and physics of fireworks.
Before gunpowder: early references and their limits
The oldest datable mention historians point to is from the Delhi Sultanate era. The chronicler Firishta, writing later about events under Sultan Nasir al-Din Mahmud, records that some 3,000 carts loaded with fireworks were assembled in 1258 to receive an envoy sent by the Mongol ruler Hulagu Khan, a detail some historians read as evidence that gunpowder or gunpowder-like incendiary material had already reached northwestern India by the mid-13th century, likely via Mongol contact routes. It is a single chronicle account written after the fact, not a contemporary technical record, so treat it as an early data point rather than a settled date for "when fireworks arrived."
A clearer, independently documented account comes nearly two centuries later. In 1443, the Persian envoy Abdur Razzaq visited the Vijayanagara empire during the reign of Devaraya II and left a firsthand description of the Mahanavami festival: elephants, acrobats, multi-storey pavilions, and pyrotechnists among the performers staged for the court. This is one of the earliest specific, named-eyewitness references to fireworks as festival entertainment on the Indian subcontinent, predating the Mughal empire by roughly a century. A separate account from 1518, by the Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa, describes fireworks at a Brahmin wedding in Gujarat, evidence the custom had spread into private celebration, not just royal courts, before Babur's invasion in 1526.
The historian P.K. Gode, first curator of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, compiled these and other pre-Mughal references in his 1953 study The History of Fireworks in India Between A.D. 1400 and 1900, still the standard scholarly starting point for anyone tracing the subject before the colonial period.
Fireworks at the Mughal court
Gunpowder's military role in India is on far firmer ground than its earlier ceremonial history: Babur's army used matchlock firearms and cannon to decisive effect at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, establishing Mughal rule in North India. Fireworks as court spectacle, separate from weaponry, developed over the following decades.
Akbar's court historian Abul Fazl records Chinese-style pyrotechnic displays staged at Agra and Fatehpur Sikri during Akbar's reign, tied to Nowruz celebrations and military victories, and Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari describes court light-and-fire customs of the period more broadly. Akbar, whose household included Rajput wives, is also described in multiple secondary histories as celebrating Diwali on a significant scale at court, one thread historians trace as an early example of fireworks crossing between an originally Islamic court culture and a Hindu festival calendar.
Fireworks reached a further level of refinement under Jahangir. His own memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, describes a 1610 display in Lahore staged by Chinese pyrotechnicians, a specific, emperor-authored primary source rather than a secondhand chronicle. Fireworks under later Mughal supervision were organised under an officer titled the mir atish ("master of fire"), and displays are recorded at royal weddings, Shab-i-Barat, and Diwali well into the 18th century. Dara Shikoh's wedding is cited in multiple secondary histories for pyrotechnics said to have turned "night into day," though the precise primary citation for that phrase is not independently confirmed here and should be read as a period description rather than a measured claim.
Aurangzeb's 1667 ban on fireworks
Not every Mughal emperor encouraged the practice. Aurangzeb, generally the more austere ruler of the line, issued a farmaan (royal edict) on 8–9 April 1667 headed "Restriction on Atishbazi," instructing the mutsaddis (administrators) of every province of the empire to stop the display of fireworks, and ordering the noble Faulad Khan to have the ban announced in the city by drumbeat. The document is preserved today in the Rajasthan State Archives at Bikaner, which is why historians can cite it by name rather than by secondhand report.
The ban is a useful corrective to any assumption that fireworks had unbroken royal favour throughout Mughal rule: it shows the practice was contested at the very top of the empire, over a century before the British East India Company held meaningful territorial power in North India. Fireworks nonetheless continued at regional courts, and the custom persisted into the 18th and 19th centuries under the Marathas and the Nawabs of Awadh, among others.
The colonial period: from court spectacle to commercial trade
By the late 18th century, fireworks had moved beyond exclusively royal patronage. The Nawabs of Lucknow, Maratha courts, and, in a sign of how far cross-cultural exchange had gone, European pyrotechnicians working in Indian courts all staged displays; one frequently cited example has an English pyrotechnician identified as "Karar" designing a fireworks programme for the Nawab of Avadh around 1790.
Organised commercial manufacturing by Indians is generally dated to 19th-century Calcutta, where the first Indian-run fireworks factory is reported to have opened, producing colour matches and light-fountains (the "anaar" or flower-pot style still sold today). Named-founder details for this Calcutta factory vary between secondary sources and are not independently confirmed here, so this page states the fact of the Calcutta origin without attaching a specific founder's name. What is consistent across sources is the broader pattern: once British Raj-era trade opened the market to cheaper imported Chinese and British fireworks, small Indian manufacturers found the imported product difficult to compete with on price, a commercial pressure that shaped the industry's structure going into the 20th century.
Post-independence: Sivakasi builds the modern industry
The industry India recognises today did not descend from the Calcutta factories. It grew from an entirely separate 20th-century starting point in Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu, and its real scale-up happened after independence.
Two cousins, P. Ayya Nadar and A. Shanmuga Nadar, spent 1922 training in Calcutta's match industry, then returned to Sivakasi and founded National Matches. Ayya Nadar started National Fireworks, the town's first dedicated fireworks venture, in 1925. Match-making and firework-making share core raw materials (red phosphorus, potassium chlorate, sulphur), so the pivot from one trade to the other was a natural extension rather than a new industry from scratch. Full detail on this founding story is in our history of Sivakasi fireworks guide.
What was one factory in 1925 became, over the following decades and especially after 1947, the dominant firecracker manufacturing base in the country. Sivakasi's dry, low-rainfall climate suited the storage of moisture-sensitive pyrotechnic compounds in a way wetter parts of India did not, a practical advantage layered on top of the founders' head start. By the industry's current count, Sivakasi and its surrounding Virudhunagar district host more than 1,000 licensed manufacturing units, employ roughly 8 lakh people directly and indirectly, and account for close to 90% of India's total fireworks production, figures verified and sourced on our Sivakasi industry statistics page.
The most recent chapter of that history is regulatory rather than industrial: the Supreme Court's 23 October 2018 judgment (Writ Petition (Civil) No. 728 of 2015) barred barium-based compositions and permitted only CSIR-NEERI-certified "green" formulations for sale, and National Green Tribunal orders in November–December 2020 restricted non-green crackers in cities with poor air quality. Trade bodies report the majority of Sivakasi's current output now carries the green-cracker tag, a transition covered in full on the industry statistics page above.
A disputed claim: the "ancient Sanskrit gunpowder formula"
One claim circulates often enough in popular articles about Indian fireworks history that it needs a direct answer: that the Sukraniti, a Sanskrit text on statecraft attributed to the sage Shukracharya, contains an ancient gunpowder formula, sometimes cited alongside the Nilamata Purana's instruction to light fires during Kartika month in honour of ancestors.
This page does not present that as settled history. The Sukraniti's date of composition is a long-running scholarly dispute, not a footnote: historians including Lallanji Gopal have argued the text cannot be genuinely ancient specifically because it describes guns, gunpowder, and cannon, technologies that did not exist in India in the period the text claims to describe; estimates for its actual composition range from a late-medieval date up to outright 19th-century authorship. Citing the Sukraniti as proof of "ancient Indian gunpowder" without that caveat misstates an active historiographical debate as fact, which is why this guide keeps its documented starting point at the medieval chronicle and eyewitness accounts above (1258 and 1443) rather than at any claimed antiquity.
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