Sawan, roughly late July into August, is the monsoon month and the most written-about month in Punjabi literature.
It is when married daughters traditionally went back to their parents' village, and the songs of Sawan are about that return and about the swings hung from trees for the women.
Teeyan is the festival of the month: women gather, swing, sing boliyan and giddha, and eat gulgule and pooda. It is a women's festival with no men present and no religious content, and it is the counterpart to the trinjan in the winter.
The Barah Maha compositions in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji use Sawan for the ache of separation, because the rain is falling and the beloved is not there, and every Punjabi Sufi and folk poet has used it the same way.
Teeyan is now celebrated mostly at colleges and in the diaspora as a cultural event with a stage. In the villages it has thinned along with everything else that required women to be free of work for an afternoon.
The Punjabi calendar runs Chet, Vaisakh, Jeth, Harh, Sawan, Bhadon, Assu, Katak, Maghar, Poh, Magh and Phagun, and every one of them carries agricultural and emotional associations.
Sawan is the monsoon month and it carries the whole literature of separation and return, because it is when the rain comes and when the married daughter goes to her parents.
The Nanakshahi calendar, adopted in 2003, fixed the Sikh dates against the solar year and has been amended and disputed since. The agricultural year still runs on the older reckoning.