The Telugu panchangam

The five limbs

Panchangam is a compound of pancha, five, and anga, limb. The name is a specification, not a poetic flourish: an almanac is a panchangam because it gives you these five quantities for a given day at a given place. Everything else printed alongside them — and modern panchangams print a great deal — is an addition to the five.

Notice what the middle column has in common. Four of the five are angles, and the fifth is a count of sunrises. None of them is a clock time. Every time given in a panchangam — every "tithi ends at 3:42" — is the moment an angle is reached, converted into the clock of a particular place. That single fact explains most of what follows.

Why a tithi is not a day

This is the mechanism behind almost every disagreement about a festival date, so it is worth getting exactly right.

A tithi is not a length of time. It is a distance. Take the angle between the Moon and the Sun as seen from Earth; each time that angle grows by 12°, one tithi has completed. Thirty of them close the circle and make one lunar month.

The Moon does not travel at a constant speed — its orbit is an ellipse, and it moves faster at some points than others. So a tithi takes however long it takes: sometimes a few hours under a day, sometimes a few hours over. And it begins and ends at a moment, which has no reason to be midnight, or sunrise, or anything else convenient.

Two consequences follow, and between them they are the whole problem:

• Vriddhi — a long tithi can still be running at two consecutive sunrises. It takes two calendar days.
• Kshaya — a short tithi can begin after one sunrise and finish before the next. It holds no sunrise at all, and gets no calendar day.

So the lunar month and the run of calendar days do not march in step. A tithi can be skipped or doubled, and a festival attached to it moves accordingly. This is why our festival dates page gives Dasara and Saddula Bathukamma but deliberately refuses to print a date for the opening day of Bathukamma: that day turns on exactly when a tithi starts, and careful sources differ by one.

Which day a festival lands on

If a tithi can begin at four in the afternoon and end at nine the next morning, which calendar day does the festival belong to?

The general answer is udaya tithi: whichever tithi is running at local sunrise owns that whole day, however briefly it may last afterwards. One sunrise, one tithi, one unambiguous day.

Several major observances override the rule, because the moment being marked was not dawn:

• Krishnashtami — Krishna is held to have been born at midnight, so the observance follows the ashtami tithi present at nishita, the middle of the night, rather than the one present at sunrise.
• Vinayaka Chaviti — keyed to madhyahna, the middle of the day, not to sunrise.

A festival's date is therefore not "the day the tithi falls on". It is the output of a rule, and the rule is chosen per festival. Where a tithi begins or ends close to the reference moment — near a sunrise, near midnight — two careful authorities applying the same tradition can reach different answers, and both will be able to show their working.

How to read this: the udaya-tithi rule and the nishita and madhyahna exceptions are standard, and are described in the same terms by panchangam publishers who disagree with each other about everything else. We have set out the rules and applied none of them. For the year in front of you, use a current panchangam computed for your own city, and for office closures the state's general-holidays order.

Months, pakshas and the year

The Telugu calendar is chandramana, lunar, and amanta: a month runs from one new moon to the next and ends at amavasya. Tamil and Malayalam calendars are solar — souramana — which is why the Telugu new year and the Tamil one are not the same festival on a different day but two different reckonings of what a year is. North Indian calendars are lunar too, but purnimanta: their months end at the full moon instead. Same days, boundaries drawn in a different place — which is why a waning-fortnight festival carries one month's name in a Telugu household and the next month's name further north, on the very same date.

Each month has two fortnights of fifteen tithis: shuddha (shukla), waxing, ending at pournami; and bahula (krishna), waning, ending at amavasya. The twelve months are:

The tithis are named with the ordinary Telugu ordinals — padyami, vidiya, tadiya, chaviti, panchami, shashti, saptami, ashtami, navami, dasami, ekadasi, dvadasi, trayodasi, chaturdasi, and then pournami or amavasya to close the fortnight. Once you know them, a great many festival names stop being names and become addresses:

• Ugadi — Chaitra shuddha padyami: the first tithi of the first month.
• Vinayaka Chaviti — the chaviti, the fourth.
• Krishnashtami — the ashtami, the eighth.
• Sri Rama Navami — the navami, the ninth.
• Vijayadashami — the dasami, the tenth.
• Toli Ekadasi — the ekadasi, the eleventh.

The name tells you the tithi. It is only the year and the place that have to be computed — which is the entire job of a panchangam.

The year has a name too. Telugu years run in a cycle of sixty samvatsaras, from Prabhava to Akshaya, and the name turns over at Ugadi along with the month count. A person who lives to see their sixtieth birthday in this reckoning has seen the cycle close, which is why that birthday is marked as it is.

The thirteenth month

Twelve lunar months come to roughly 354 days. The solar year is roughly 365. Left uncorrected, the calendar would walk backwards through the seasons at about eleven days a year — Ugadi would drift out of spring within a working lifetime, and the harvest festivals would stop landing on the harvest.

The correction is an extra month, adhika masa, and the rule that places it is unusually elegant. The Sun crosses from one sidereal sign into the next twelve times a year, and each crossing is a sankranti. Since a lunar month is slightly shorter than the Sun's stay in one sign, a lunar month will occasionally contain no sankranti at all. That month is declared adhika, and it takes the name of the month it doubles. No arbitrary schedule is needed; the calendar detects its own drift.

This works out at roughly one extra month every three years. The opposite case also exists — a lunar month brief enough to contain two sankrantis is dropped, kshaya masa — but it can only occur in the stretch of the year where the Sun moves fastest, and it is rare enough that most people never encounter one.

Source note: the no-sankranti rule is the classical definition and is the one applied by published panchangams. We have not printed which years carry an adhika masa. That is a computed result with a shelf life, and it belongs in a current panchangam rather than on a page like this one.

Why two panchangams disagree

Buy two panchangams at Ugadi and they may not agree with each other. There is a reason, and it is not carelessness.

The older tradition is vakya. It works from vakyas — short mnemonic sentences that encode tables of planetary positions, inherited from the classical siddhantas and built to be memorised and worked by hand, without instruments and without a printing press. It is a remarkable piece of engineering for the conditions it was designed for.

The modern method is drik ganita, computation made to agree with observation. It calculates where the Sun and Moon actually are, using modern astronomy, and reads the five limbs off those positions.

The two do not always place the end of a tithi at the same moment. Usually that does not matter. When the difference straddles a sunrise, it decides a date — and the two almanacs print different days for the same festival.

Both traditions describe the distinction between them in these terms, so the description is not contested even though the results sometimes are. We have not tried to adjudicate. It is worth noting that the drik method is what the Government of India's own almanac uses, and that vakya publishers themselves use modern computation for eclipse prediction.

A panchangam belongs to a place

This is the part that matters most to Telugu families abroad, and the part that the free panchangam sites are worst at.

Everything above is anchored to local sunrise. Which tithi owns a day is settled at the sunrise where you are. Sunrise in Hyderabad and sunrise in New Jersey are most of a day apart, so the same tithi can be the udaya tithi on one date in India and on the date before or after it abroad. Neither calendar is wrong. It is one rule, applied honestly at two places, giving two answers.

The same is true of everything else the panchangam derives from sunrise. Rahukalam is the clearest example, because so many people check it. The daylight period — sunrise to sunset — is divided into eight equal parts, and one of those eight parts is rahukalam, which one depending on the weekday. Both ends of it therefore move with the season, with the latitude, and with the longitude. Rahukalam in Hyderabad in June and rahukalam in Hyderabad in December are different clock times, for the same weekday, by the same rule.

The practical consequence for anyone outside India is simple: use a panchangam computed for your own city, not the one from home, and expect it to differ by a day sometimes. That difference is the calendar working correctly, not a fault in it.

The official one

India has a national almanac, it is computed by government astronomers, it is published in Telugu, and it can be downloaded for nothing. Almost nobody who buys a panchangam at Ugadi knows this.

The Rashtriya Panchang is produced by the Positional Astronomy Centre at Salt Lake in Kolkata, an office of the India Meteorological Department. In the Centre's own words it has appeared "since 1879 Saka Era (1957-58 A.D.)", with the object of "unifying the divergent practices of calendar systems existing in different parts of the country and also to promote panchang calculations on a modern scientific basis."

It gives sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset for four metropolitan cities, along with tithis, nakshatras, yogas and the transits of the Sun, Moon and planets, "calculated accurately with computer and are based on modern scientific principles". It is issued in fourteen languages — Hindi and English, plus twelve others including Telugu — and the IMD publishes each language edition as a free download.

Two things are worth taking away from it. The first is that the state's own reference almanac is a drik computation, published expressly to put panchangam calculation on a modern footing. The second is quieter, and it is the point of the section above: even the national almanac gives sunrise for four cities and no more. The location problem is not our observation. It is stated by the authority itself, in the structure of what it prints.

Sources: the description and all quotations above are from the India Meteorological Department's own Rashtriya Panchang page, checked September 2026, where the Telugu edition download was confirmed working. The Positional Astronomy Centre's own site at packolkata.imd.gov.in carries the same text, but serves an incomplete certificate chain, so we have named it rather than linked it and pointed at the IMD page instead. Note also that the national almanac is the reference for calendrical computation only — it is the General Administration Department's holiday order, not any panchangam, that decides whether an office is open.

This page explains how the Telugu calendar is computed. It is not itself a panchangam: it prints no tithis, no muhurthams and no daily timings, because every one of those depends on your date and your location. It makes no predictions of any kind — a panchangam is a calendar, and this page treats it as one. For festival dates see Telangana festival dates; for office and bank closures see how the holiday list works. Last reviewed September 2026.