6 Ritu Names With Months: Three Ways to Count Seasons

The Hindu year has six ritus, or seasons, of two months each: Vasant, Grishma, Varsha, Sharad, Hemant, Shishir. Which two months make each one depends on what the almanac counts months by. The list most people learn ties each ritu to a pair of lunar months, so Vasant is Chaitra and Vaishakha. Almanacs also count ritus by the Sun, and they do that in two ways that sit about three and a half weeks apart.

The three counts give different answers for the same day. On 27 October 2026, still Ashwina in a month count that ends at the new moon, the lunar and the sidereal solar counts both say Sharad, while the tropical count moved into Hemant on 23 October 2026. The sidereal solar Hemant begins on 16 November 2026 and the lunar one on 9 December 2026. All three are worked out below from the site’s computed Sun and Moon tables.

The Six Ritus and Their Months

The English words are rough equivalents. Hemant and Shishir are both winter, the first the onset of cold and the second its depth, and Varsha is the monsoon rather than a temperate season. The last column gives the month names of the Yajurveda, which names the twelve months by season: Madhu and Madhava are the two months of Vasant, and so on to Tapas and Tapasya for Shishir.

Why One Day Can Fall in Two Ritus

The tropical count measures the Sun from the March equinox. Its Shishir begins at the December solstice, when the Sun reaches 270°, and each ritu is the next sixty degrees. This ties the seasons to the Sun’s turnings, and it is usually what an almanac means when it prints a drik ritu. On 22 December 2026 this count’s next Shishir begins.

The sidereal solar count uses the same two-sign pairs, but measured against the stars, so Shishir begins when the Sun enters sidereal Capricorn in mid-January. The two counts differ by the ayanamsa, about 24 degrees today, and the Sun covers that in about 23 to 26 days. In every row of the table below the tropical ritu starts 23 to 26 days before the sidereal one. The gap grows by about a day every 70 years. The ayanamsa page explains where those 24 degrees come from.

The lunar count follows the months. An amanta month is named by the sidereal sign the Sun holds at the new moon that opens it, so a lunar ritu always begins inside its own sidereal solar ritu, between 2 and 23 days after it in this window. Sharad Navratri, which opens Ashwina, therefore also opens the lunar Sharad: on 11 October 2026, 30 September 2027 and 19 September 2028. North Indian almanacs end their months at the full moon instead, so their months, and the lunar ritus built from them, open a fortnight earlier: their Kartika opened at the full moon of 26 October 2026, as Kartik month 2026 sets out. The dates on this page use the new-moon count.

Ritus that follow lunar months inherit the adhika month as well. In 2026 the new moons of 17 May 2026 and the month after both fell with the Sun in Taurus, giving Adhika Jyeshtha, so the lunar Grishma that began on 17 May 2026 ran 87 days, three months instead of two. The site’s adhika table has no other extra month before 2029. The lunar month lengths page has each month’s exact length.

When Each Ritu Begins, Autumn 2026 to Autumn 2028

Each ritu runs until the next row’s date in the same column. The lunar column gives the date of the new moon that opens the first month, the sidereal column the day the Sun enters the first sign, and the tropical column the day the Sun reaches the starting longitude, all in IST.

The lunar ritus in this window are all 58 or 60 days long, because two lunar months make about 59 days and no adhika month falls inside it. The solar ritus are not equal either: sidereal and tropical alike run 59 to 63 days. The Earth moves fastest near the start of January, so the Sun crosses the sixty degrees of Shishir quickest and those of Varsha slowest. The sidereal dates match the Sun’s sign entries on the Sun’s transit page. A Sankranti festival is sometimes kept on the next day, and this page does not give those festival days.

Festivals and the Ritu They Fall In

Vasant Panchami is named for spring, but in each of the three years of the site’s tables it falls in Shishir by all three counts: on 23 January 2026, 11 February 2027 and 1 February 2028. It is the fifth tithi of Magha, the first month of the lunar Shishir, and the Sun is still in Capricorn or Aquarius on that day and short of the tropical 330°. Its date for each year is on the festival calendar.

Sharad Purnima, the full moon of Ashwina, falls in the first of the lunar Sharad’s two months, on 14 October 2027. The Uttarayana of the almanacs is a related case of two reckonings. Traditional panchangs begin it at the Sun’s entry into sidereal Capricorn, which is the start of the sidereal Shishir, while the Sun’s actual northward turn is the December solstice that opens the tropical one. The Makar Sankranti 2027 page covers that day.

In Brief

• How many ritus: six, of two months each
• Lunar months: Vasant Chaitra-Vaishakha; Grishma Jyeshtha-Ashadha; Varsha Shravana-Bhadrapada; Sharad Ashwina-Kartika; Hemant Margashirsha-Pausha; Shishir Magha-Phalguna
• Ritu on 27 October 2026: Sharad by the lunar and sidereal counts, Hemant by the tropical one
• Next Shishir: tropical from 22 December 2026, sidereal from 14 January 2027, lunar from 6 February 2027
• Tropical vs sidereal: 23 to 26 days apart, the ayanamsa

For the month and paksha of a particular day, see the Vikram Samvat page on how a Samvat date is written, or the samvatsara list for the year’s name. In Hindi: 6 ऋतुओं के नाम और महीने: ऋतु गिनने के तीन तरीके.