Choghadiya (四刻吉時)

Sixteen Windows a Day — India's Everyday Electional Clock

Overview

Ask a shopkeeper in Jaipur or a wedding planner in Ahmedabad when to begin, and the answer comes from one table: the choghadiya. The day from sunrise to sunset splits into eight equal windows of about ninety minutes — 'four ghadis' each — and the night into eight more, every window named and graded: Amrit is nectar, good for everything; Labh promises gain; Shubh blesses ceremonies; Chara favors travel; and Udveg, Kaal and Rog are the three to sit out. No priest required, no chart cast — just the weekday, the sun, and a rotation so regular it can be written as two rules. It is, by sheer daily usage, one of the most-consulted electional systems in the world. askTIAN computes all sixteen windows for any date and place from real sunrise astronomy, marks the current window, and serves the tradition's guidance for each — with the entire table verified cell-for-cell against an independent reference implementation.

Origin & history

Choghadiya belongs to the practical muhurta tradition of North India — the working layer of Vedic electional astrology, where the full apparatus of chart and lagna compresses into a table anyone can read. Its seven windows are keyed to the seven classical planets: Udveg to the Sun, Chara to Venus, Labh to Mercury, Amrit to the Moon, Kaal to Saturn, Shubh to Jupiter, Rog to Mars. The rotation is pure structure: the day's first window belongs to the weekday's own lord — Sunday opens with Udveg, Monday with Amrit — and successive windows step forward through the cycle, which is exactly the Chaldean planetary order read from the Sun. Seven qualities in eight slots means the day's last window always repeats its first, a signature every printed table shows. The night runs its own rule: it opens with the choghadiya of the lord four days ahead — Sunday night begins with Shubh, Jupiter's window, Thursday's lord — and steps backward by two.

The choghadiya never needed reviving because it never faded: it is printed in every North Indian panchang, painted on temple walls, and is today the single most-used page of the major online panchang services — the table commuters check before signing, traveling, or opening a shop. The engineering risk in serving it is quiet convention drift between sources, so askTIAN's implementation is generated from the two structural rules and then locked cell-for-cell against the PyJHora reference implementation's day and night tables — all 112 cells verbatim in the test suite — with the Sunday sequences additionally matching the published drik-panchang tables by name. One honest research note: the Tamil sibling system, Gowri Panchangam, was researched in the same pass and deliberately parked — no second verifiable source for its tables was in hand, and this catalogue does not fabricate tables.

How it works

Give the engine a date, coordinates and timezone offset. It computes sunrise, sunset and the next day's sunrise with the shared gold-tested solar solver, divides the day arc and the night arc into eight windows each, and assigns qualities by the two rules — day: start at the weekday lord's choghadiya, step forward; night: start at the lord of weekday-plus-four, step back by two. Each of the sixteen windows returns its exact start and end, its length (windows stretch and shrink with the season — near the equinoxes they approach the textbook ninety minutes, a property locked as a test), its planet, quality, meaning, and the tradition's activity guidance, labelled as tradition. A goodWindows digest lists the favorable spans ready for display, and an optional HH:MM marks the caller's current window — with the classical convention honored that an instant before sunrise belongs to the previous day's night. Polar latitudes are refused rather than fabricated. Deterministic, pure compute, no LLM.

Good for

Use cases

The Good-Times Strip

One call renders the day as sixteen colored segments with 'now' marked — the choghadiya strip every panchang app leads with, computed for the user's actual coordinates instead of a city lookup table.

The Auspicious Scheduler

Feed goodWindows into a booking flow: surface Amrit, Shubh and Labh spans as suggested slots for signings, launches and ceremonies, with the tradition's own guidance as the copy.

The Complete Muhurta Stack

Layer choghadiya's universal windows over muhurta.personal's tara and chandrabala: a day that is Amrit for everyone AND Sampat for this user is the tradition's full green light.

The Printed Panchang Page

Seven calls render the classical weekly table — day and night halves, the repeating eighth window, the whole structure the reference tables lock — for print, widget or wall display.

Key terms

Choghadiya
'Four ghadis' — one window of about 90 minutes, an eighth of the day or night arc; sixteen windows cover a full planetary day.
The Seven Qualities
Udveg (Sun, bad), Chara (Venus, good), Labh (Mercury, good), Amrit (Moon, best), Kaal (Saturn, bad), Shubh (Jupiter, good), Rog (Mars, bad).
Amrit
The nectar window, the Moon's — good for all undertakings, per the tradition; the table's unconditional green light.
The Day Rule
The first day window belongs to the weekday lord's choghadiya, stepping forward through the cycle — the Chaldean planetary order read from the Sun.
The Night Rule
The first night window belongs to the choghadiya of the lord of (weekday+4), stepping backward by two through the cycle.
The Repeating Eighth
Seven qualities in eight slots: every day and every night ends on the window it began with — the structural signature of the system.
Vela Windows
Sub-windows (Vaar Vela, Kaal Vela) some tables overlay for night commerce; a further refinement not fabricated here — the sixteen classical windows ship first.
Reference-Locked Tables
All 112 day and night cells reproduce the PyJHora reference tables verbatim, with Sunday's sequences additionally matched by name against the published drik-panchang tables.

API

The askTIAN Choghadiya API generates the sixteen daily windows from the system's two structural rules — day forward from the weekday lord, night backward-by-two from the lord of weekday+4 — and locks the result cell-for-cell against the PyJHora reference tables (all 7×8 day and night cells verbatim) with the published drik-panchang Sunday sequences as a second independent anchor. Real sunrise/sunset astronomy from the shared gold-tested solver, night windows running to the next day's sunrise, the equinox ~90-minute property locked as a test, current-window marking with the pre-sunrise convention, and the tradition's guidance served as tradition. Polar latitudes refused. Pure compute, no LLM, 2 TIAN.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/muhurta.choghadiya — 2 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.