8 Prahar of Day and Night: How Long Is One Pahar?

A prahar, said pahar or pehar in everyday Hindi and called a yama in Sanskrit texts, is a quarter of the day or a quarter of the night. There are eight in a full day and night: four between sunrise and sunset, and four more between sunset and the next sunrise. The Bhagavata Purana (3.11.10) gives the count as “four yamas and four” for the day and the night of human beings. Because each set of four is cut from the daylight or the darkness actually present, and not from the clock, a prahar lasts exactly three hours only when day and night are equal. At New Delhi in 2027 a day prahar will run from 2 h 35 min in December to 3 h 30 min in June.

How Many Hours Is One Pahar?

The equal answer is the simple one. Twenty-four hours over eight watches is 3 h 00 min, and in the ghati reckoning, where a day and night hold 60 ghati, it is 7.5 ghati, which is 7 ghati 30 pala. That figure is an average. The working rule is two divisions, one for each half of the day: day prahar = (sunset − sunrise) ÷ 4, and night prahar = (next sunrise − sunset) ÷ 4.

A worked case. On Friday 1 January 2027, the site’s DE421 table for New Delhi gives sunrise at 07:13 and sunset at 17:35: 622 minutes of daylight. A quarter of that is 155½ minutes, so each of the four day prahar will be about 2 h 36 min. The night that follows will hold 819 minutes until the next sunrise, so each night prahar will be 204¾ minutes, about 3 h 25 min. The same eight watches, in other words, will differ by about 49 minutes depending on which side of sunset they fall. Because the table drops the seconds of every sunrise and sunset, each figure can be off by up to a minute of daylight, a quarter-minute per prahar.

Prahar Length at New Delhi, Month by Month

The first of each month from November 2026 to December 2027, read off the daily table behind the New Delhi panchang. Lengths are rounded to the nearest minute.

Two patterns run through the table. A day prahar and the night prahar after it always add up to 6 h 00 min, give or take the table’s rounding, so whatever the day gains the night loses. And the day prahar is longer than three hours only on the rows from 1 April to 1 September 2027; on every other row the night prahar is the longer one. Across all of 2027 the longest daylight at New Delhi, 838 minutes, will come on nine dates between 15 June and 25 June, making the longest day prahar 209½ minutes; the shortest daylight, 619 minutes, will come on six dates between 17 December and 27 December, making the shortest 154¾ minutes. Those two differ by 54¾ minutes. The dates scatter rather than forming one block because the table cuts both ends of the day to the whole minute.

Testing Forbes’s “Three and a Half Hours”

In 1882 Duncan Forbes, in a note to page 23 of his translation of Mir Amman’s Bagh o Bahar, reasoned from the rule that two pahars fill the time from sunrise to noon. It followed, he wrote, that “in the north of India the pahar must have varied from three and a-half hours about the summer solstice, to two and a-half in winter, the pahars of the night varying inversely.” His figures can be checked. At New Delhi on the June solstice, 21 June 2027, a day prahar will be 209½ minutes, within half a minute of his 3.5 hours. On the December solstice, 22 December 2026, it will be 155 minutes, five minutes longer than his 2.5. So Delhi’s computed swing is 54½ minutes, a little short of the full hour he gives. He was right about the nights: the night prahar is 2 h 31 min in June and 3 h 25 min in December, close to the day figures with the seasons swapped.

Run the same division at both solstices across India and the hour appears only in the far north. On this table Jammu and Amritsar are the cities whose swing reaches an hour; Amritsar comes closest to both of his figures at once, and Jammu passes both, its June prahar longer than three and a half hours and its December one shorter than two and a half. Southward the swing shrinks steadily, to 17 minutes at Kochi, where a day prahar never strays far from three hours.

New Delhi is read off the DE421 table, the other cities off the sunrise formula behind the city pages; the two agree at Delhi to within a minute of daylight on both dates. Lengths are in minutes, to the quarter-minute the division produces. Longitude does not enter: moving east or west shifts sunrise and sunset together and leaves their difference alone. Latitude alone sets the swing, which is why Jammu’s is 65 minutes and Kochi’s 17. Sunrise and sunset for any of the cities, day by day, are on panchang by city.

The Same Prahar in Ghati and in Muhurtas

In the ghati reckoning the length of daylight is the dinman, and the day prahar is a quarter of it. At the 24-minute ghati the ghati and pala conversion uses, New Delhi’s longest 2027 dinman will be 34 ghati 55 pala, so its day prahar will be 8 ghati 44 pala; the shortest dinman will be 25 ghati 48 pala, so its prahar will be 6 ghati 27 pala. Against those, the equal prahar is 7 ghati 30 pala. The pala figures are rounded to the nearest pala, 24 seconds.

The muhurta divides the same daylight into 15 parts, the same division of daylight the site’s panchang computes with, so a day prahar is 15÷4 = 3.75 muhurtas. On the longest 2027 day each muhurta will be 55.9 minutes, on the shortest 41.3. Because 3.75 is not a whole number, the two grids line up only at sunrise and at sunset. The end of the second prahar, the midpoint of daylight, falls at muhurta 7.5, the middle of the eighth muhurta rather than its edge. All thirty muhurtas of a day and night, with their names, are set out in the 30 muhurtas and their length.

The Bhagavata’s own arithmetic does not quite match this. The second half of its verse 3.11.8 reads te dve muhūrtaḥ praharaḥ ṣaḍ yāmaḥ sapta vā nṛṇām: two of the nadikas just named make a muhurta, and six or seven make a yama. The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust translation takes the six or seven as dandas, another name for the nadika or ghati, which gives a yama of 2 h 24 min to 2 h 48 min, short of the 7.5 ghati that an equal eighth of the day needs. The line does not repeat its unit, and read with muhurta instead it gives 4 h 48 min to 5 h 36 min, so that four yamas would hold 24 to 28 muhurtas, more than the 15 a day contains. Neither reading yields an equal eighth, and this page does not choose between them; the counts of four and four, and of 2 ghati to a muhurta (48 minutes), are what it relies on.

Dopahar, and Why No List of Eight Names Here

The prahar survives in ordinary speech. The Hindi and Urdu word for afternoon, dopahar, is literally “two pahars”, as Henry Hoenigswald’s Spoken Hindustani (1945) records it: the point at which two prahar of the day have passed. Under the sunrise rule that point is the midpoint of daylight, local noon, which is not the same as noon on the clock. At New Delhi it falls later than noon by IST on every day of 2027, and it falls at a different minute in every city.

On the names of the eight prahar this page has to say less than a reader may hope. The lists checked for this page do not agree with one another, and the one complete list found ties each name to a fixed three-hour block of the clock, a different scheme from the sunrise division the Bhagavata describes. The Bhagavata passage itself only counts the watches. Lacking a list that can be traced to a text, this page names them by number, first prahar of the day to fourth prahar of the night. A fixed three-hour block also drifts from the computed prahar: at New Delhi it will be 29½ minutes shorter than the day prahar on the longest day and 25¼ minutes longer than it on the shortest.

The first prahar of the day starts where the Hindu day starts, at sunrise, which is also how the weekday is fixed for a birth before dawn; the sunrise-based vaar works through that rule. The stretch just before sunrise is a separate reckoning again, and Brahma muhurta by city and month gives its timing. The last prahar of the day ends at sunset, where godhuli bela sits.

The Four Prahar of Shivratri

Maha Shivratri is the observance whose vidhi keeps a puja in each of the four prahar of the night. In 2027 the festival night will be Saturday 6 March 2027. At New Delhi, from sunset that evening to sunrise on 7 March, the night will last 12 h 17 min, so each of its four prahar will be 184¼ minutes, a few minutes over three hours. The Maha Shivratri 2027 page explains why that night and not the next is the one, and what is done in each prahar. Neither that page nor this one prints the clock times at which the prahar change. They differ by city with sunset and sunrise, and the site’s rule is to give the length and the method and leave each boundary to the local sunset and sunrise.

A prahar is a measure, not a verdict. This page gives lengths; it does not call any watch good or bad for an undertaking. In Hindi: आठ प्रहर: एक पहर कितने घंटे का होता है.

In Brief

• How many: eight, four of the day and four of the night (Bhagavata Purana 3.11.10)
• Equal length: 3 h 00 min, or 7 ghati 30 pala
• Real length: daylight ÷ 4 by day, night ÷ 4 by night
• New Delhi, 2027: day prahar from 2 h 35 min to 3 h 30 min
• Forbes (1882): 3.5 h in summer, 2.5 h in winter; Delhi computes to 3 h 30 min and 2 h 35 min
• In muhurtas: 3.75 of the day’s 15; the grids meet only at sunrise and sunset
• Maha Shivratri 2027: four night prahar of 3 h 04 min each at New Delhi