Kharmas, Malmas and Adhik Maas: three pauses people confuse
The Sun’s sidereal sign right now, which is what opens or closes Kharmas — the Sun stands in sidereal Cancer on 31 July 2026, so Kharmas is not in force today.
Kharmas: the Sun in Sagittarius and Pisces
Kharmas is a SOLAR pause. It runs while the Sun occupies the sidereal sign of Sagittarius — roughly the sixteenth of December to the fourteenth of January — and again, in most readings, while it crosses Pisces from around the fourteenth of March to the thirteenth of April. Weddings, house entries and the major samskaras stop; the calendar reopens at Makar Sankranti and again at the Sun’s entry into Aries.
The reason offered is that the Sun is then sitting in the sign of the guru, Jupiter, the graha whose sanction the samskaras rely on. With the teacher occupied hosting the king, the argument runs, the blessing is not available to be given. Whether that satisfies you or not, the mechanism is unambiguous and computable: it depends on the Sun’s sidereal longitude and nothing else, so its dates shift by only a day or so between years.
The Pisces half of the pause is the less universally observed. Some traditions treat only the Sagittarius transit as Kharmas and handle the Pisces period as a lighter caution; others observe both fully. This site excludes both for marriage and treats them as hard bars, which is the more conservative choice and means a handful of dates other calendars offer do not appear on ours.
Malmas: mostly a naming problem
Malmas literally means the impure month, and it causes trouble because two different things wear the name. In much of the Hindi belt, Malmas is used as an everyday synonym for Kharmas — the solar pause described above — and you will hear people say the wedding season is closed for Malmas in late December. Used that way it is simply another word for the same solar period.
In the more technical usage, Malmas means the intercalary lunar month — Adhik Maas — which is an entirely different phenomenon with a different cause, a different length and a different frequency. Both are periods when auspicious beginnings pause, which is exactly why the two got conflated, but a calendar built on one will be wrong if you read it expecting the other.
The practical test is the date. If someone tells you Malmas runs mid-December to mid-January, they mean Kharmas. If they tell you Malmas is falling in, say, July this year and did not fall at all last year, they mean Adhik Maas. The word alone will not tell you; the timing always will.
Adhik Maas: the leap month and why it exists
The Hindu calendar is lunisolar, which means it has an arithmetic problem to solve. Twelve lunar months run about three hundred and fifty-four days while the solar year runs about three hundred and sixty-five, so the lunar calendar drifts eleven days a year against the seasons. Left alone, Diwali would migrate through the summer within a couple of decades.
The correction is an extra month. A lunar month in which the Sun makes no sankranti — no entry into a new sidereal sign — is declared Adhik Maas and inserted, which happens roughly every thirty-two and a half months, so about seven times in nineteen years. The inserted month takes the name of the one that follows it, prefixed with Adhik, and the following month is then called Nija or Shuddha. The very rare mirror case, a month containing two sankrantis, produces a Kshaya or lost month, and can only occur near the winter solstice.
Adhik Maas is treated as unsuited to new beginnings and well suited to devotion — it is also called Purushottama Maas and is given over to recitation, charity and pilgrimage. Two extra Ekadashis, Padmini and Parama, belong to it and appear only in the years it occurs.
| Pause | Driven by | Typical timing | Frequency | Chiefly closes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kharmas (Dhanu) | Sun in sidereal Sagittarius | ~16 Dec – 14 Jan | Every year | Marriage, griha pravesh, major samskaras |
| Kharmas (Meen) | Sun in sidereal Pisces | ~14 Mar – 13 Apr | Every year | The same, with less uniform observance |
| Adhik Maas | A lunar month with no solar sankranti | Varies — any month | ~every 32.5 months | All auspicious beginnings; devotion is encouraged instead |
Kharmas dates move by a day or two between years because they follow the Sun’s sidereal ingress, not the civil calendar. Adhik Maas dates do not follow a civil pattern at all and must be looked up per year.
What this does to the wedding season
Put the three together with the combustion bars and the shape of the Indian wedding calendar becomes obvious rather than mysterious. Mid-December through mid-January is closed by Kharmas. Mid-March through mid-April is closed again. Any Adhik Maas that falls in a given year removes a further month wherever it lands. Whatever weeks Venus or Jupiter spend combust are removed on top.
What remains bunches into November, and then into a long run from late January through June with the Pisces gap cut out of it. That is why halls and priests are booked a year ahead for a narrow set of weeks, and why a family that cannot marry in one season often waits the better part of a year rather than a month.
It also explains a common frustration with date lists like the ones on this site: a year can genuinely have very few qualifying dates for a rite, and that is a real result rather than a shortcoming in the data. When our griha pravesh page returns a single-figure count for a year, the bars above have done most of the work before a single nakshatra was considered.
Frequently asked questions
Can anything at all be started during Kharmas?
Plenty. The pause addresses the major samskaras — marriage above all, along with house entry and the formal life-cycle rites. Ordinary business continues, routine purchases continue, journeys continue, and devotional observance is actively encouraged. Several traditions also permit engagements and other agreements that are not themselves samskaras, though practice on that varies by region.
How do I know whether a given year has an Adhik Maas?
It has one when some lunar month contains no solar sankranti, which is a computed fact rather than a pattern you can predict by counting years. The interval averages about thirty-two and a half months, so most three-year windows contain one, but the exact month it lands in varies and has to be looked up for the specific year from a computed calendar.
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.