India Calendar

The Indian national calendar, sometimes called the Shaka calendar or aka calendar, is a solar calendar that is used alongside the Gregorian calendar by The Gazette of India, in news broadcasts by All India Radio, and in calendars and official communications issued by the Government of India.[1] aka Samvat is generally 78 years behind the Gregorian Calendar, except from January to March, when it is behind by 79 years.

Through historical Indian influence, the aka calendar is also used in Java and Bali among Indonesian Hindus. Nyepi, the "Day of Silence", is a celebration of the aka new year in Bali. Nepal's Nepal Sambat evolved from the aka calendar. The aka calendar was also used in several areas in the modern-day Philippines as written in the Laguna copperplate inscription. In India, Yugabda is also used with corresponding months of aka/Nepal Sambat. Yugabda is based on Kaliyuga Sankhya preserved by Indian Astrology. The Kali Yuga began 5,125 years ago and has 426,875 years left as of 2024 CE.[2][3][4] Kali Yuga will end in the year 428,899 CE.

India Calendar

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Caitra[5] is the first month of the calendar and begins on the March equinox, similar to Farvardin, the first month of the Iranian Solar Hijri calendar. Chaitra has 30 days and starts on 22 March, except in leap years, when it has 31 days and starts on 21 March.[6] The months in the first half of the year all have 31 days, to take into account the slower movement of the sun across the ecliptic at this time.

The names of the weekdays are derived from the seven classical planets (see Navagraha). The first day of the week is Ravivra (Sunday).[7] The official calendar reckoned by the government of India has Sunday as the first and Saturday as the last day of the week.[1]

According to the Indian government sources, the Satavahana king Shalivahana is believed to have created the calendar that came to be known as the aka Calendar after he defeated aka rulers.[citation needed] But the origin of the Shaka era is highly controversial. According to scholars, the beginning of the Shaka era is widely equated to the ascension of Indo-Scythian king Chashtana in 78 CE.[9]

Senior Indian Astrophysicist Meghnad Saha was the head of the Calendar Reform Committee under the aegis of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Other members of the committee were: A. C. Banerjee, K. L. Daftari, J. S. Karandikar, Gorakh Prasad, R. V. Vaidya and N. C. Lahiri. It was Saha's effort, which led to the formation of the committee. The task before the committee was to prepare an accurate calendar based on scientific study, which could be adopted uniformly throughout India. The committee had to undertake a detailed study of thirty different calendars prevalent in different parts of the country. The task was further complicated by the integration of those calendars with religion and local sentiments. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his preface to the Report of the committee, published in 1955, wrote: "They (different calendars) represent past political divisions in the country ... . Now that we have attained Independence, it is obviously desirable that there should be a certain uniformity in the calendar for our civic, social, and other purposes, and this should be done on a scientific approach to this problem."[10] Usage started officially at 1 Chaitra 1879, Shaka Era, or 22 March 1957.

The Hindu calendars have been in use in the Indian subcontinent since Vedic times, and remain in use by the Hindus all over the world, particularly to set Hindu festival dates. Early Buddhist communities of India adopted the ancient Vedic calendar, later Vikrami calendar and then local Buddhist calendars. Buddhist festivals continue to be scheduled according to a lunar system.[6] The Buddhist calendar and the traditional lunisolar calendars of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand are also based on an older version of the Hindu calendar. Similarly, the ancient Jain traditions have followed the same lunisolar system as the Hindu calendar for festivals, texts and inscriptions. However, the Buddhist and Jain timekeeping systems have attempted to use the Buddha and the Mahavira's lifetimes as their reference points.[7][8][9]

The Hindu calendar is also important to the practice of Hindu astrology and zodiac system. It is also employed for observing the auspicious days of deities and occasions of fasting, such as Ekadashi.[10]

The Vedic culture developed a sophisticated time keeping methodology and calendars for Vedic rituals,[12] and timekeeping as well as the nature of solar and Moon movements are mentioned in Vedic texts.[13] For example, Kaushitaki Brahmana chapter 19.3 mentions the shift in the relative location of the Sun towards north for 6 months, and south for 6 months.[14][15]

Yukio Ohashi states that this Vedanga field developed from actual astronomical studies in ancient Vedic Period.[19][20] The texts of Vedic Jyotisha sciences were translated into the Chinese language in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, and the Rigvedic passages on astronomy are found in the works of Zhu Jiangyan and Zhi Qian.[21] According to Subhash Kak, the beginning of the Hindu calendar was much earlier. He cites Greek historians describing Maurya kings referring to a calendar which originated in 6676 BCE known as Saptarsi calendar.[22]

The Hindu texts used the lunar cycle for setting months and days, but the solar cycle to set the complete year. This system is similar to the Jewish and Babylonian ancient calendars, creating the same challenge of accounting for the mismatch between the nearly 354 lunar days in twelve months, versus over 365 solar days in a year.[4][29] They tracked the solar year by observing the entrance and departure of Surya (sun, at sunrise and sunset) in the constellation formed by stars in the sky, which they divided into 12 intervals of 30 degrees each.[30] Like other ancient human cultures, Hindus innovated a number of systems of which intercalary months became most used, that is adding another month every 32.5 months on average.[29] As their calendar keeping and astronomical observations became more sophisticated, the Hindu calendar became more sophisticated with complex rules and greater accuracy.[29][31][30]

According to Scott Montgomery, the Siddhanta tradition at the foundation of Hindu calendars predate the Christian era, once had 18 texts of which only 5 have survived into the modern era.[29] These texts provide specific information and formulae on motions of Sun, Moon and planets, to predict their future relative positions, equinoxes, rise and set, with corrections for prograde, retrograde motions, as well as parallax. These ancient scholars attempted to calculate their time to the accuracy of a truti (29.63 microseconds). In their pursuit of accurate tracking of relative movements of celestial bodies for their calendar, they had computed the mean diameter of the Earth, which was very close to the actual 12,742 km (7,918 mi).[29][30]

Later, the term Jyotisha evolved to include Hindu astrology. The astrological application of the Hindu calendar was a field that likely developed in the centuries after the arrival of Greek astrology with Alexander the Great,[20][32][33] because their zodiac signs are nearly identical.[17][34]

Hinduism and Buddhism were the prominent religions of southeast Asia in the 1st millennium CE, prior to the Islamic conquest that started in the 14th century. The Hindus prevailed in Bali, Indonesia, and they have two types of Hindu calendar. One is a 210-day based Pawukon calendar which likely is a pre-Hindu system, and another is similar to lunisolar calendar system found in South India and it is called the Balinese saka calendar which uses Hindu methodology.[37] The names of month and festivals of Balinese Hindus, for the most part, are different, though the significance and legends have some overlap.[37]

The Hindu calendar is based on a geocentric model of the Solar System. A large part of this calendar is defined based on the movement of the Sun and the Moon around the Earth (saura mna and cndra mna respectively). Furthermore, it includes synodic, sidereal, and tropical elements. Many variants of the Hindu calendar have been created by including and excluding these elements (solar, lunar, lunisolar etc.) and are in use in different parts of India.

Samvat refers to era of the several Hindu calendar systems in Nepal and India, in a similar manner to the Christian era. There are several samvat found in historic Buddhist, Hindu and Jain texts and epigraphy, of which three are most significant: Vikrama era, Old Shaka era and Shaka era of 78 CE.[38]

The Hindu calendar divides the zodiac into twelve division called ri. The time taken by the Sun to transit through a ri is a solar month whose name is identical to the name of the ri. In practice, solar months are mostly referred as ri (not months).

The solar months are named differently in different regional calendars. While the Malayalam calendar broadly retains the phonetic Sanskrit names, the Bengali and Tamil calendars repurpose the Sanskrit lunar month names (Chaitra, Vaishaka etc.) as follows:

Two traditions have been followed in the Indian subcontinent with respect to lunar months: the amanta tradition, which ends the lunar month on new moon day (similar to the Islamic calendar) and the purnimanta tradition, which ends it on full moon day.[48] As a consequence, in the amanta tradition, Shukla paksha precedes Krishna paksha in every lunar month, whereas in the purnimanta tradition, Krishna paksha precedes Shukla paksha in every lunar month. As a result, a Shukla paksha will always belong to the same month in both traditions, whereas a Krishna paksha will always be associated with different (but succeeding) months in each tradition.

The amanta (also known as Amavasyanta or Mukhyamana) tradition is followed by most Indian states that have a peninsular coastline (except Assam, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which use their own solar calendars). These states are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Nepal and most Indian states north of the Vindhya mountains follow the purnimanta (or Gaunamana) tradition. 006ab0faaa