Karana: the eleven half-tithis and the one that stops everything
The karana in force at sunrise today — the karana at New Delhi sunrise on 31 July 2026 is Taitila — not the obstructing one.
Half a tithi, sixty times a month
A karana is half a tithi — six degrees of the Moon’s separation from the Sun rather than twelve. Thirty tithis therefore give sixty karanas in a lunar month, and those sixty are covered by only eleven names. It is the fastest-moving of the five limbs, changing roughly every nine to thirteen hours, which means the karana at sunrise is often not the karana at the hour you intend to act.
The eleven split into two unequal groups. Seven are chara or movable and rotate continuously; four are sthira or fixed and each appears exactly once in the whole lunar month, clustered around the new moon. The rotation is the reason the movable seven appear eight times each: seven names repeating through fifty-six of the sixty slots, with the four fixed ones filling the remainder.
Of the five limbs, the karana is the one people can most safely ignore in general conversation and least safely ignore in an election, because one of its eleven names is a hard stop. Everything below is really about that one.
The eleven karanas
The four fixed karanas occupy the second half of the fourteenth of the dark fortnight through the first half of the first of the bright — the seam of the lunar month. Kimstughna sits at the start of the new cycle and the other three run out the end of the old one.
| Karana | Type | Appearances per lunar month | Character | Classically suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bava | Movable | 8 | Beginning, motion | Auspicious beginnings, most rites |
| Balava | Movable | 8 | Strength, learning | Study, teaching, brahminical acts |
| Kaulava | Movable | 8 | Friendship, bonding | Alliances, marriage-adjacent acts |
| Taitila | Movable | 8 | Fixity, prosperity | Trade, ornaments, sale and purchase |
| Gara (Garaja) | Movable | 8 | Cultivation, growth | Sowing, building, agricultural work |
| Vanija | Movable | 8 | Exchange | Commerce, agreements, negotiation |
| Vishti (Bhadra) | Movable | 8 | Obstruction | Avoided for beginnings — see below |
| Shakuni | Fixed | 1 | Omen, watchfulness | Medicine, mantra, expiatory rites |
| Chatushpada | Fixed | 1 | Four-footed | Cattle, ancestral offerings |
| Naga | Fixed | 1 | Serpent, stillness | Nothing new; propitiation |
| Kimstughna | Fixed | 1 | Slayer of harm | Auspicious — opens the bright fortnight |
Vishti is a movable karana, so it recurs eight times a lunar month, which is roughly every three or four days for about half a day at a time. It is not a rare event.
Why one name carries almost all the weight
Vishti, better known as Bhadra, is the reason the karana is checked at all. During it, auspicious beginnings are suspended: weddings, house entries, first journeys, inaugurations and formal signings are all moved out of the window. Nothing else in the karana list produces anything like that effect, and no other karana would change an election on its own.
The suspension is not total. Several acts are traditionally exempt — surgery and other cutting work, litigation, the recovery of a debt, acts of defence, and in some readings anything performed in an emergency. This is the familiar pattern: a difficult period is not empty, it is simply suited to difficult work. The exemptions are why a hospital does not consult a panchang before an urgent procedure and no tradition asks it to.
Because Vishti is only half a tithi, timing matters more here than anywhere else in the panchang. A Bhadra that begins at three in the afternoon leaves the whole morning clear; one that ends at eleven leaves the rest of the day open. An almanac that flags a day as Bhadra without giving the window is close to useless, and treating a whole day as blocked because Vishti touched part of it discards several perfectly usable dates every month.
Using the karana in practice
For a shortlist, the honest approach is the one this site takes: exclude a date when Vishti is in force AT SUNRISE, because sunrise is the reading a daily panchang is built on, and state plainly that the exclusion is coarser than a full check. A date we drop may in truth have had a clear afternoon, and a date we keep may have a Bhadra window later in the day that the hour-level election still has to avoid.
For choosing an hour on a date already fixed, look up the actual Bhadra window and work around it exactly as you would around Rahu Kaal. The two are unrelated systems — one is a half-tithi, the other an eighth of the daylight — and they will sometimes overlap and sometimes not, so both need checking separately.
The other ten karanas are worth reading but not worth waiting for. Bava on an otherwise good day is a small confirmation; Kimstughna opening the bright fortnight is a pleasant note. Neither should move a date by a week, and a source that ranks days primarily by karana has inverted the weight the tradition gives it.
There is a reason the karana survives in the panchang at all despite doing so little electional work, and it is a practical one. Because it moves twice as fast as the tithi, it is the limb that tells you the tithi is about to change: when the second karana of a tithi begins, you are past the halfway point. Before printed ending times were common, that was a genuinely useful piece of navigation, and it is why the limb kept its place among the five long after most of its individual names stopped changing anyone’s decisions.
Frequently asked questions
The panchang says Bhadra but only for part of the day. Is the whole day spoilt?
No. Vishti occupies half a tithi, so it typically covers something between nine and thirteen hours and the rest of the day is unaffected. The standard practice is to keep the auspicious act outside that window rather than to abandon the date, which is why almanacs print the start and end times rather than just the label.
Why does this site exclude a date for Bhadra when the window may not overlap my ceremony?
Because the shortlist is built from a single sunrise reading of the whole year and cannot know your intended hour. Excluding on the sunrise karana is the conservative choice: it drops some dates that would have worked in the afternoon rather than offering dates that would not have worked at all. Running a specific date and hour against a chart is what resolves it properly.
Related guides
How this guide is maintained
Everything computed on this site â the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables â comes from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris and a NOAA sunrise model applied to the exact coordinates of the city shown, with New Delhi as the reference city for anything not city-specific. Where this guide describes a rule that genuinely varies between texts, regions or family traditions, it says so in the paragraph rather than picking a side quietly, and where the site’s own date scorer takes a documented shortcut, the shortcut is named.
What no guide on this site can do is weigh your own chart. The tables here are a panchang shortlist — the classical tests a calendar can settle — and the personal layer that decides between the surviving dates is a separate step. Start with the occasion pages for computed dates, and see how we compute muhurat for the full method.
Written and maintained by Savan Vyas. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug, and corrections are genuinely welcome.
For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.