Amalaki Ekadashi 2027: Date, Arunodaya by City and Parana

Amalaki Ekadashi 2027 falls on Thursday, 18 March 2027, the eleventh day of Phalguna’s bright half and the last Ekadashi before Holi. The date itself is the easy part: the tithi takes in a single sunrise in each of the 38 cities the site computes, and it is the same morning everywhere. Two other questions take more work. How far ahead of arunodaya the tithi begins depends on the city, and in the east the lead runs out. And on the parana morning the first quarter of Dwadashi is still running after sunrise, so the fast cannot simply be broken at dawn.

What Is Amalaki Ekadashi? (आमलकी एकादशी)

Amalaki is the Sanskrit name of the amla, the Indian gooseberry tree, and the Ekadashi is named after it; some calendars print it as Amla Ekadashi. The vrat-katha collections that trace the observance to the Brahmanda Purana make the tree the object of worship on this day, alongside the Ekadashi fast itself. In Varanasi the same day goes by a different name, Rangbhari Ekadashi, which comes from the custom of the Kashi Vishwanath temple; rang is colour, and the name looks ahead to the Holi that the 2027 table puts four days later.

Those are the tradition’s accounts, and this page reports them as such. It makes no claim about what keeping the fast or performing the tree worship does, and it says nothing about the amla as food. The general rules of an Ekadashi fast, the eve, the day and the breaking, are collected on the Ekadashi vrat rules page. Another observance centred on the amla tree, in Kartika, has its own page at Akshaya (Amla) Navami.

The Tithi, Hour by Hour

Computed with the site’s lunar code, the Shukla Ekadashi begins at 04:21 on 18 March, in the small hours, and ends at 01:51 on 19 March, also in the small hours. Neither instant is in a festival table. The same code matches the DE421 tables to within 1 minute at the 86 tithi instants where both exist, and that is the accuracy every clock time below carries.

Set against the New Delhi mornings, the daily table reads Shukla Navami at the 06:29 sunrise of Wednesday the 17th, Shukla Ekadashi at 06:28 on Thursday the 18th, and Shukla Dwadashi at 06:26 on Friday the 19th. On the 18th the tithi is already 2 hours 7 minutes old when the sun comes up, and it is gone three hours or more before any city’s sunrise on the 19th. So the sunrise reading of Smarta almanacs has a single day to offer, and the city figures agree: even in Guwahati, where the sun rises first, the tithi is more than an hour old at the local dawn.

A Dashami That Barely Sees a Sunrise

The tithi before it is unusual this year. The Shukla Dashami opens at 06:43 on 17 March and runs straight into the Ekadashi at 04:21 the next morning, so it falls almost entirely between two sunrises. In New Delhi the sun is up at 06:29 on the 17th, only 14 minutes before the Dashami begins; the daily table, reading the DE421 ephemeris, calls that morning Shukla Navami. A gap that small is within this page’s 30-minute margin, so the page does not rule on it. Further west the order flips by a few minutes: in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Surat and Jodhpur the computed sunrise comes just after the Dashami has begun.

Only in the east is the answer clear. In Kolkata, Patna, Varanasi, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Ranchi and Raipur the sun rises 30 minutes or more before the Dashami starts and the next morning dawns on Ekadashi, so there the Dashami holds no sunrise at all: a kshaya, or lost, tithi. That changes how a local almanac labels the 17th, but not the fast day. Nor does it change the eve. In every city the Dashami is still current at the 17th’s sunset, with at least nine hours to go, so a household that eats once on the eve, before sunset, eats in Dashami.

Arunodaya: Clear in the West, Too Close to Call in the East

Vaishnava calendars following the Hari Bhakti Vilasa ask whether the Ekadashi is already current at arunodaya, the 96 minutes before sunrise. If Dashami is still running then, they treat the Ekadashi as Dashami-viddha and keep the fast a day later. Because the tithi starts only a couple of hours before dawn, that test comes down to minutes. In New Delhi it passes by 31 minutes, just over the threshold. The widest clearance on the list, Ahmedabad’s, is 49 minutes.

The earlier the sunrise, the earlier the arunodaya and the shorter the lead. In 20 cities the margin is 30 minutes or more. In 13 more (Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Lucknow, Bhopal, Nagpur, Varanasi, Visakhapatnam, Dehradun, Agra, Madurai, Raipur and Kanpur) it is positive but under 30. In five (Kolkata, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Ranchi) the computed start comes after arunodaya, by as much as 28 minutes in Guwahati. A negative margin would make the day Dashami-viddha for those calendars, but none of these is 30 minutes or more, and so the page names them as close and goes no further. If you keep the Vaishnava reckoning in one of those cities, the date your own calendar prints for your town, the 18th or the 19th, is the one to follow. The Smarta day is the 18th everywhere.

Sunrise times come from the site’s solar code for each city’s coordinates; a town between two of these will sit between their figures. The panchang calculator computes New Delhi alone; for other cities, sunrise and sunset across 2026 and 2027 are on the city panchang pages.

Parana on Friday, After Hari Vasara (पारण)

Dwadashi begins at 01:51 on 19 March and lasts until 23:17 on 19 March, a long tithi of 21 hours 26 minutes that covers the whole of Friday. Ending the fast while Dwadashi is current is therefore no difficulty; the evening limit is late at night. What decides the earliest moment is Hari Vasara, the opening quarter of Dwadashi, which almanacs publishing a parana window still count as part of the fast. A quarter of this Dwadashi is a little over five hours, so Hari Vasara is still running when the sun comes up on the 19th: in New Delhi it is over a little under an hour after the 06:26 sunrise. This page prints no clock time for that quarter-point; panchangs that publish a parana window give it for their own place.

Across most of the list the sunrise comes first by a clear half hour or more, and the wait is longest where the sun rises earliest: in Guwahati Hari Vasara ends 104 minutes after sunrise. In Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Surat and Jodhpur the two moments are under 30 minutes apart, and the page does not read anything into their order there. One instruction holds for all of them: break the fast on Friday morning once Hari Vasara is over, not at first light; the whole of the rest of the day is still Dwadashi.

Phalguna in Both Month Systems

This fortnight opens with the new moon at 14:59 on 8 March, with the Sun in sidereal Aquarius, which in the amanta reckoning makes the lunation Phalguna. The Sun crosses into Pisces on 15 March, three days before the Ekadashi; the lunar month keeps the name it opened with, so nothing is renamed. The purnimanta Phalguna is a fortnight older. It begins after the full moon of 21 February, the subject of the Magh Purnima 2027 page, and so its dark half holds Maha Shivratri on Saturday 6 March, which the festival rules file under the amanta month of Magha. Both reckonings meet in the bright half, so this Ekadashi is Phalguna Shukla in either. The Phalgun 2027 page gives the month’s boundaries in each system.

Holi arrives as the same fortnight ends. The full moon at 16:13 on 22 March is the Purnima the table uses for Holika Dahan, set for Sunday 21 March, three days after the Ekadashi, with Holi the next day, Monday 22 March. The Ekadashi also falls inside Holashtak, which runs from 14 March to 21 March this year. The March 2027 vrat list sets all of these in order with the month’s other observances.

Quick Reference

• Fast (sunrise reading, every city): Thursday 18 March 2027
• Ekadashi tithi (computed): 04:21 on 18 March to 01:51 on 19 March
• Arunodaya in New Delhi: clear by 31 minutes; close in 18 of 38 cities, see the table
• Dashami (computed): 06:43 on 17 March to 04:21 on 18 March; current at every city’s sunset on the 17th
• Parana: Friday 19 March 2027, after Hari Vasara ends (in New Delhi, a little under an hour after sunrise); Dwadashi lasts until 23:17
• New Delhi sunrise and sunset on 18 March: 06:28 and 18:31; nakshatra at sunrise Pushya
• Month: Phalguna Shukla, amanta and purnimanta alike

The full year of Ekadashis, with the dates where the two readings part, is in the Ekadashi 2027 list. The bright-fortnight Ekadashi a month earlier is on the Jaya Ekadashi 2027 page, and the rest of the year is in the 2027 festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: आमलकी एकादशी 2027: तारीख, शहरवार अरुणोदय और पारण.