The Calendar

Punjab keeps time in two ways at once. The months a farmer names, Chet, Visākh, Jeṭh and the rest, follow the sun, and each begins on saṅgrānd, the day the sun crosses into a new sign of the zodiac. The days printed beside them in a jantrī (ਜੰਤਰੀ · جنتری), the Punjabi almanac, follow the moon. Together they make the Bikrami calendar, which numbers its years in the Vikram Samvat, an era traditionally counted from 57 BCE.

The same twelve month names are used across both Punjabs, by Muslim, Sikh and Hindu Punjabis alike, and the calendar below reckons them for any day between 1469 and 2100. Choose where you are: a month’s first day and a day’s tithi both turn on the moment of sunrise, and sunrise depends on the place.

How to read it

Two kinds of month

A Desi month is solar. It begins at saṅgrānd, when the sun, measured against the stars rather than the seasons, enters the next of the twelve signs, and it lasts until the next crossing, between 29 and 32 days, because the earth moves fastest in early January. A crossing is an instant and a day is not, so a rule decides which day it names. The Punjabi rule runs from sunrise to sunrise: a crossing after midnight but before dawn belongs to the day that is ending. That is why Vaisākhī fell on 13 April in 2025, though the sun entered Mesha at 3.21 in the morning, Indian time, on the 14th.

A lunar day is a tithi, the time the moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the sun: a little under a day on average, and anything from about 20 to 27 hours. Thirty tithis make a lunar month, fifteen in the bright fortnight, sudī, as the moon waxes to pūranmāshī, the full moon, and fifteen in the dark fortnight, vadī, as it wanes to massiā, the new moon. Each day takes the tithi in force at its sunrise. Because tithis are uneven, one now and then begins and ends between two sunrises and names no day, and another spans two sunrises and names both; the calendar shows both as they fall.

In Punjab, as across North India, the lunar month runs from full moon to full moon, so its dark fortnight comes first. Diwali falls on the new moon in the middle of Kattak, and Guru Nanak’s gurpurab on the full moon that ends it.

The added month

Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, and the two would drift apart if nothing were done. About once every three years a lunar month passes in which the sun enters no new sign. That month is adhik, added: it takes the name of the month that follows and sits between that month’s two fortnights. In 2026 an adhik Jeṭh ran from 17 May to 15 June, as reckoned at Amritsar. Very rarely the opposite happens and one lunar month holds two crossings. It is called kshaya, a lost month; the last was in 1983, and none is due again this century.

Counting the years

The Bikrami calendar counts its years in the Vikram Samvat, 56 or 57 years ahead of the Common Era. The lunar year, and with it the samvat, turns on Chet sudī 1, the first lunar day after the new moon of Chet: 19 March in 2026 and 7 April in 2027. The solar year turns later, on 1 Visākh, the day of Vaisākhī, when the harvest is due. The Nanakshahi calendar begins its year on 1 Chet instead. The calendar here prints the samvat of the lunar year.

Two ways to fix a Desi month

The Bikrami reckoning lets each month begin whenever the sun’s crossing falls, so its first day moves by a day or so from year to year, and slowly later over the centuries. The Nanakshahi calendar, drawn up by Pal Singh Purewal and adopted by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 2003, fixes the months instead: 1 Chet is always 14 March, the first five months have 31 days and the other seven 30, and Phaggaṇ gains a day in leap years. In 2010 the SGPC returned its saṅgrānds to the Bikrami crossings and several of its gurpurabs to lunar dates, keeping the Nanakshahi name; the original fixed calendar is still followed by others, among them Sikh bodies in Pakistan and North America. Both are in use, so the calendar shows both and says which is which.

Where you stand

A day’s tithi and a month’s first day both hang on sunrise, and sunrise depends on the place. The calendar reckons for Amritsar, Lahore, London or Vancouver. Amritsar and Lahore lie about fifty kilometres apart and almost always agree, but not always: 1 Magghar fell on 16 November 2020 in Amritsar and on the 15th in Lahore, because the sun crossed in the two minutes between their sunrises. London and Vancouver part company more often, since a crossing that comes after dawn in Punjab can still come before dawn further west, and so name the day before. A community abroad may keep the date printed in Punjab rather than reckon its own.

How sure this is

Sure of the astronomy, careful about the conventions. The instants come from the Swiss Ephemeris; they agree with published new and full moons to within three minutes back to 1469, and with published saṅgrānd moments to within three minutes. The sunrise rule reproduces all 61 saṅgrānd dates we could find published for 2023 to 2027, nearly all from the SGPC’s calendars, including one on which the sun crossed three minutes before dawn. Older jantrīs worked from older astronomy, such as the Sūrya Siddhānta, whose year is a few minutes longer than the sun’s; its crossings now come hours later in some months, and the SGPC’s calendars do not follow it.

Three things are conventions rather than measurements, and the calendar flags them where they matter. The first is the rule for a short tithi that holds no sunrise: it names the day on which it begins, which is how almanacs placed the new year of 2026, though festivals follow rules of their own. The second is the day the samvat turns when Chet itself is doubled, on which published almanacs disagree for 2029. The third is every date before 1752.

Dates before 1752

Every date here is in the Gregorian calendar, extended backwards to years before it existed. Britain took it up only in 1752, and in Punjab it arrived with British rule in the nineteenth century, so an older date on this page will not match the one in a source written at the time. By this count the sun entered Mesha on 9 April 1699; in the Julian calendar, which many histories use for that year’s Vaisākhī, it is 30 March.

The Hijri date

The widget also gives the Islamic Hijri date, worked out by the standard arithmetical rule. The date kept in practice follows the sighting of the new moon, which is announced separately in Pakistan, India and Britain and can fall a day or two either side of the arithmetic, so read it as a guide, not as the announced date.

Not here yet

Festivals and gurpurabs are not marked yet. Each follows its own rule, and several are fixed by a religious body rather than computed, so every such date needs a named source before it is printed; that is the next stage of this work. The Bārāṅ Māhā, the twelve-month poems, one of which is read in gurdwaras at each saṅgrānd, will have its own page in the poetry section, and each month will link to its stanza there.