About

HinduCalendar.in tells you what matters today, why it matters, and how to observe it.

There are good Hindu almanacs online already, and they are remarkably comprehensive. What they mostly are not is legible — they present a reference database and leave the reader to work out which of the forty values on the screen concerns them. If you grew up in a household where someone always knew, that is fine. If you didn't, it isn't.

This site is built for the second case: households that want to keep the traditions but do not always know the rules, in India and outside it. Every date carries the location it was computed for, every term is tappable, and every festival page answers five questions rather than one.

What this calendar covers

Hindu observances. This is a Hindu calendar, so Christian and Islamic festivals are not listed here — not as an opinion about them, simply because this is not the calendar for them and a half-kept list is worse than none. If you need Christmas, Good Friday, Eid or Muharram, a general Indian holiday calendar will serve you better than we would.

We do carry the observances a printed Hindu panchang carries alongside its own: Buddha Purnima, which Vaishnava tradition reads through the Buddha as an avatara of Vishnu; Mahavir Jayanti; and the Sikh gurpurabs that Punjabi Hindu households commonly keep. Five national civic days are on the calendar too — Republic Day, Independence Day, Gandhi Jayanti, May Day and the Gregorian New Year. They are not anyone's religion.

We do not take observances from government holiday lists. Those are state gazettes: they carry every religion's holidays, they are compiled for administrative purposes rather than religious ones, and on a pan-India dataset they turn out to be one state's list rather than the country's. Every festival and vrat here comes from the governed calendrical datasets instead, where each date has a stated rule.

Where a Hindu festival genuinely shares its night with another tradition's, the guide says so. The Deepavali page tells you that Sikhs keep the same night as Bandi Chhor Divas, because that is true and a reader who encounters it deserves the explanation.

What we deliberately do not do

• We do not publish thin pages to fill the calendar. A festival with no guide shows its date and says the guide isn't written yet.
• We do not hide disagreements between traditions. Where two calendars honestly differ, we show both and name the rule each is following.
• We do not invent dates. If our validated dataset has no row, the page says so rather than computing something plausible.
• We do not claim review we have not had. Every guide states whether a named reviewer has checked it.
• We do not do horoscopes or matchmaking. Not because there is anything wrong with them, but because bolting them on to raise page views is how a calendar stops being a calendar.

Where the numbers come from

The panchanga is computed, not copied — see how we calculate for the engine, the ayanamsa, the governing-period rules and the current known limits. When we get something wrong, it goes in the corrections log.