History of the Hindu Calendar

The history of calendars in India is a remarkably complex subject owing to the continuity of Indian civilization and to the diversity of cultural influences.

The Hindu calendar, also called Panchanga/Panjika, is an ancient time reckoning system used for, among other things, determining the dates of Hindu festivals. It is a lunisolar calendar with many regional variations.

History and Background

The Hindu calendar was developed in ancient times by various scholars on the Indian subcontinent. The earliest mentions of Hindu time reckoning can be found in the Vedas, a body of sacred texts of Hinduism.

Multi-dimensional Calendar

One of the most striking features of the Hindu calendar system is its intricacy. It offers a multi-dimensional method of structuring time, combining information about lunar days, solar days, lunar months, solar months, the movements of the Sun and the Moon about stellar constellations, and other astronomically defined periods. This makes the Hindu calendar vastly more complex than the Western calendar, which is built around only two basic units of time: solar days and solar years.

To complicate things even further, there is not one single Hindu calendar. Each country and region uses its variant of the ancient system. The Indian National Calendar or Saka Calendar, the official standardized calendar of India since 1957, represents but one of many variations of the Hindu calendar. Still, some features are common to all or most variants.

12 Lunar Months…

Months in the Hindu Calendar:

The Hindu calendar uses a lunisolar system, meaning that it takes into account the apparent movements of both the Moon and the Sun, as seen from Earth. It is primarily based on the length of a synodic lunar month. Each of the 12 lunar months in the calendar encompasses the time it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth in relation to the Sun.

Each lunar month is divided into 30 lunar days. These are further grouped into two fortnights with 15 days each: a “bright” fortnight that comprises the waxing half of the phases of the Moon and a “dark” fortnight that features a waning Moon.

In most areas in northern India, the month starts on the Full Moon, while most people in southern India count the days of the month from one New Moon to the next.

…and 12 Solar Months

At the same time, the Hindu calendar tracks solar months, which are defined by and named after the zodiac signs the Sun traverses during different parts of the year, as seen from Earth. While the lunar months are commonly used to determine religious holidays and rituals, the solar time reckoning usually serves as the basis for civil purposes, so solar months are also referred to as civil months.

When Does the Year Begin?

In most regions, the year starts on the New Moon before the Sun enters the zodiac sign of Aries (Meṣa). This happens on or around the day of the March equinox, which marks the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

Added or Omitted Months

Since 12 lunar months amount to only 354.367 days on average, a leap month is added about every three years. This synchronizes the calendar with the length of a sidereal year, which is the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun in relation to fixed stars. An average sidereal year lasts about 365.256 days.

A month can either be added or omitted. An intercalary month, called Adhik Maas or Purushottam Maas, is added when a lunar month starts and ends before the Sun has moved to a new zodiac sign. In the rare case that the Sun traverses a whole zodiac sign during the course of a lunar month, the month is removed from the calendar. When this occurs, another month is repeated elsewhere in the year, so the year always has 12 or 13 months.

Lunar Days and Solar Days

Hindu time reckoning applies a similar correction mechanism to keep lunar days and solar days in sync. It defines a lunar day as the time span in which the Moon moves 12° in relation to the Sun — a 30th of the 360° it travels during a synodic lunar month. A solar or civil day is defined by the moment of sunrise.

If a lunar day starts and ends in the course of one solar day, a day is omitted in the calendar, so the date may jump from the 5th to the 7th of the month, for example. On the other hand, if a lunar day encompasses two sunrises, the day number is repeated. In that case, two consecutive days are assigned the same number.

Nakshatra, Yoga, and Karaṇa

The Hindu calendar also tracks various other astronomical time spans:

• Nakshatra: Also called lunar mansions, nakshatras are portions of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, each measuring 13° 20′. They are derived from Hindu astrology.
• Yoga: The yogas are portions of the combined longitudes of the Sun and the Moon, each measuring 13° 20′. Each yoga is associated with certain human qualities, deities, or other mythological figures, and each solar day is associated with the yoga reached at sunrise.
• Karaṇa: A karaṇa encompasses half a lunar day. As with yogas, each karaṇa is associated with certain qualities, and each solar day is associated with the karaṇa that is active at sunrise.

Read: Concept of Creations and Yugas (Time Period) in Hinduism

History of the Indian Calendar

In the mid-1950s, when the Calendar Reform Committee made its survey, there were about 30 calendars in use for setting religious festivals for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. Some of these were also used for civil dating. These calendars were based on common principles, though they had local characteristics determined by long-established customs and the astronomical practices of local calendar makers.

Early allusions to a lunisolar calendar with intercalated months are found in the hymns from the Rig Veda, the oldest living written records that provide information of a more specific nature. A five-year lunisolar calendar coordinated solar years with synodic and sidereal lunar months.

Indian astronomy underwent a general reform in the first few centuries C.E., as advances in Babylonian and Greek astronomy became known. New astronomical constants and models for the motion of the Moon and Sun were adapted to traditional calendric practices. This was conveyed in astronomical treatises of this period known as Siddhantas, many of which have not survived. The Surya Siddhanta, which originated in the fourth century but was updated over the following centuries, influenced Indian calendrics up to and even after the calendar reform of C.E. 1957.

The author Pingree provides a survey of the development of mathematical astronomy in India. Although he does not deal explicitly with calendrics, this material is necessary to fully understand the history of India’s calendars.

Time Keeping: Astronomy & Astrology

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

Timekeeping was important to Vedic rituals, and Jyotisha was the Vedic era field of tracking and predicting the movements of astronomical bodies in order to keep time, in order to fix the day and time of these rituals. This study is one of the six ancient Vedangas, or ancillary science connected with the Vedas – the scriptures of Vedic Sanatan Sanskriti.

Yukio Ohashi states that this Vedanga field developed from actual astronomical studies in the ancient Vedic Period. 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. According to Subhash Kak, the beginning of the Hindu calendar was much earlier. He cites Greek historians describing Maurya kings referring to a calendar that originated in 6676 BCE known as the Saptarsi calendar.

The Vikrami calendar is named after King Vikramaditya and starts in 57 BCE.

Why Hindu calendar is 50 years ahead of the English calendar?

The English calendar you are referring to is counted only after the birth of Jesus Christ. Before Jesus was born many civilizations existed and they had their way of counting years. The Judeo-Christians had their way of counting years. Romans were rulers of that land and they too had their system of counting years. In the sixth century, a Christian monk added some years to the Roman Julian Calendar and came up with the idea of the Christian calendar(AD). ʿUmar I, the second caliph, in the year 639 CE introduced the Hijrah era (now distinguished by the initials ah, for Latin anno Hegirae, “in the year of the Hijrah”). ʿUmar started the first year ah with the first day of the lunar month of Muḥarram, which corresponds to July 16, 622, in the Julian calendar.

The famous Hindu calendar ‘Bikram Sambat’ started in the name of Hindu King Bikram Aditya and is counted from 57BC, but another South Asian Calendar ‘Saka Sambat’ which is also a Hindu calendar is counted only from 78AD.

These dates do not mean one religion or culture is superior to another. Different religious civilizations took different events to be significant enough to count years from the date of those particular events.

Read: THE 4 YUGAS IN HINDUISM

Currently, India Uses:

The Indian government used the Gregorian calendar for administrative purposes. For Hindu festivals, the Hindu calendar is followed, for Muslim festivals, in India, the Islamic calendar is followed.

To Note: An acknowledgement of Information Sources is attached as embedded links. The topic deals with religion, customs and practices; therefore, some sections are direct references. I acknowledge that the direct references belong to their original writers. This article has been published for education and informational purposes only.