The Hindu calendar, month by month

The lunar months under this one

Working out which lunar months this calendar month covers…

Pick a day to see its sunrise, its rahu kaal and the five limbs with the minute each one ends.

Festivals and vrats

Why the month above has two names

A Hindu lunar month is one full cycle of the Moon, about 29 days and 13 hours — and there are two answers to where it starts. In the amanta reckoning, used across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, the month ends at the new Moon. In the purnimanta reckoning, used across most of the north, it ends at the full Moon. Same sky, same tithi, same minute — different month name for half of every month.

The consequence is not academic. Krishna Janmashtami is Shravana Krishna Ashtami in Pune and Bhadrapada Krishna Ashtami in Delhi, and it is the same afternoon. The amavasya of Diwali closes amanta Ashvina and falls inside purnimanta Kartika — which is why the festival is "Kartika Amavasya" everywhere while the fortnight before it has two different names depending on whom you ask. Most apps pick one silently. This one draws both.

The month takes its name from the Sun, not the Moon: it is named for the sign the Sun enters during it. Because a lunar month is shorter than a solar one, roughly every 32 months a lunar month contains no such entry at all — that month is adhika, intercalary, and the year has thirteen. 2026 has one: Adhika Jyeshtha, 16 May to 15 June. How this is computed →

What a tithi is, and why it is not a day

A tithi is the time the Moon takes to gain 12° on the Sun. That is about 24 hours and 48 minutes on average, and it swings between roughly 22 and 26 hours as the Moon moves through perigee and apogee — so a tithi is never a day, it only looks like one. The one running at sunrise is the one the day is named for, which is the convention that makes "today's tithi" a phrase at all. It means a tithi that begins after one sunrise and ends before the next gets no day of its own, and one that spans two sunrises gets two.

The Moon drawn in each cell is the same number as a picture: the tithi counts the Moon's distance from the Sun in twelfths of a sign, and the phase is that distance. Fifteen is always a full Moon or a new one, which is why those are the days the two month bands change on.