How the Gujarati Calendar Works

It Follows the Moon, Corrected by the Sun

The Gregorian calendar is solar: it tracks the Earth's orbit around the Sun and ignores the Moon entirely, which is why its months have no astronomical meaning at all. A purely lunar calendar, such as the Islamic one, does the opposite, which is why Ramadan drifts steadily through the seasons.

The Gujarati calendar is lunisolar. Its months are genuine lunar months, running from one new moon to the next, but the year is periodically corrected so that it stays locked to the seasons. Twelve lunar months come to roughly 354 days, about eleven days short of the solar year, so without correction Diwali would slide into the monsoon within a couple of decades. The correction is an extra month, and it is covered further down.

That eleven-day gap is the whole reason a Gujarati festival appears to move around the English calendar. It is not moving. The English calendar is.

The Twelve Months

The Gujarati year opens with Kartak, the day after Diwali, and closes with Aso. This is worth stressing, because most of North India runs the same Vikram Samvat era but starts its year in Chaitra instead. Gujarat's new year is Bestu Varas, and it falls the morning after Diwali night.

The "roughly corresponds to" column really is rough. A Gujarati month starts wherever the new moon falls, so its Gregorian span shifts by up to a fortnight from year to year.

Sud and Vad: The Two Halves of a Month

Every lunar month splits into two fortnights of fifteen tithis each.

• Sud (સુદ), the bright fortnight, runs from the day after the new moon to the full moon. The Moon is waxing. In Sanskrit this is shukla paksha.
• Vad (વદ), the dark fortnight, runs from the day after the full moon to the new moon. The Moon is waning. In Sanskrit, krishna paksha.

Gujarat uses amanta reckoning, meaning a month ends at the new moon (amas). So sud always comes first and vad second, and the month closes on amas. Posh ends on Posh amas; the next morning is Maha sud ekam.

The fifteenth day of each fortnight has its own name rather than a number: Punam (પૂનમ) for the full moon at the end of sud, and Amas (અમાસ) for the new moon at the end of vad. The other fourteen are counted ekam, bij, trij and so on — see what a tithi is for the full list.

Adhik Maas: The Extra Month

Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year. Left alone, the calendar would drift out of the seasons. The fix is to insert a thirteenth month roughly every 32 to 33 months, which works out at about seven times in nineteen years.

This extra month is adhik maas (અધિક માસ), also called purushottam maas. The rule that decides where it goes is elegant: the Sun moves into a new zodiac sign once a month, an event called a sankranti. Normally each lunar month contains exactly one. Occasionally a lunar month passes with no sankranti at all, because it happens to sit entirely between two of them. That month is declared adhik, and it takes the name of the month that follows it. So you get Adhik Shravan followed by Nij (true) Shravan.

Festivals attach to the nij month, not the adhik one, so an adhik maas does not duplicate Janmashtami. What it does is push everything after it about a month later against the English calendar, which is why some years Diwali is in early October and others in mid-November.

The mirror image, a kshaya maas — a lunar month containing two sankrantis, which is therefore dropped — is possible but rare, occurring only around a century apart in most reckonings, and always alongside adhik months in the same year.

Which Year Is It?

The year number is Vikram Samvat, which runs 56 to 57 years ahead of the Common Era. Gujarati Calendar 2026 shows Vikram Samvat 2082 for most of that Gregorian year. The era, the new year date, and why Gujarat differs from the rest of India on this are covered in Vikram Samvat explained.

You may also see Shake (Shalivahana Shaka) quoted in the panchang, which runs 78 years behind the Common Era and is India's national civil era. Both appear in a full daily panchang, alongside the name of the year in the sixty-year Jovian cycle.

Reading a Gujarati Date

Put together, a date such as વિક્રમ સંવત ૨૦૮૨, પોષ સુદ તેરસ, ગુરુવાર unpacks as:

• Vikram Samvat 2082 — the year
• Posh — the lunar month
• Sud — the bright fortnight, so the Moon is waxing
• Teras — the thirteenth tithi of that fortnight
• Guruvar — Thursday

Once you can read that line, the rest of the panchang follows: the nakshatra tells you where the Moon sits against the stars, and the choghadiya divides the day into working periods. Start with the five limbs of a panchang.

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