Varshphal: How the Varsh Pravesh Time Is Calculated

A varshphal, the annual chart of the Tajik system, is not cast for your birthday at your birth time. It is cast for the varsh pravesh, the instant the Sun comes back to the exact sidereal degree it held when you were born. That instant moves. For the two births worked below it comes about six hours later in the day each year, drops back about eighteen hours after each leap day, and is never more than a day before the birthday or two days after it. Because the clock time shifts by a quarter of a day, the lagna of the year chart at Delhi lands two to four signs further on each year for these two births.

Every instant on this page comes from the JPL DE421 ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa, the same source as the site’s ingress tables. Each lagna comes from the site’s ascendant routine, for New Delhi unless another city is named. The two births are illustrations, not real people.

What the Varsh Pravesh Is

The annual chart belongs to Tajik, the branch of Indian astrology that Nilakantha’s sixteenth-century Tajika Nilakanthi sets out. In that system a year of life runs from one solar return to the next. The chart for the year is drawn for the return moment, with the grahas where they stand then and the lagna rising at the place chosen for it. By definition the Sun in every varshphal sits at the degree it had at birth. Everything else in the chart moves: the Moon, the other grahas and, most of all, the lagna.

Worked Example: Born 15 August 1990, 10:30 IST, New Delhi

At this birth the Sun stood at Cancer 28°24′ sidereal and the lagna was Virgo (Kanya). Every varsh pravesh of this life is the moment the Sun is back at Cancer 28°24′. The table gives seven of them. “Years completed” is the age at which that year of life begins, and the lagna is for New Delhi.

So this person’s 37th year began on 15 August 2026 at 15:56, 5 h 26 min after the birth time of day, and the next year begins on 15 August 2027 at 22:08, late in the evening. A chart cast for 10:30 on the birthday is a different chart: its lagna is in another sign in five of these seven years.

Why It Comes About Six Hours Later Each Year

Between one return and the next the Sun makes one full circuit against the stars. Across the 111 year-to-year intervals of the two worked births, that circuit took 365 days plus 6 h 01 min to 365 days plus 6 h 18 min, and 6 h 09 min beyond 365 days on average. The spread of about a quarter of an hour comes mostly from small periodic wobbles: the Earth’s monthly swing around its common centre with the Moon, the pull of the planets, and the nutation of the equinox, which the mean Lahiri value used here does not remove. Cutting each instant to the minute adds the rest. A common year of 365 days is about six hours short of that circuit, so the return lands about six hours later on the clock. A leap year adds a day to the calendar, so instead of coming six hours later the return comes about eighteen hours earlier in the day: in the table, 2027’s 22:08 is followed by 04:23 on the same date in 2028, because 29 February 2028 falls between them.

The exact year length matters more than it looks. The Surya Siddhanta’s sidereal year is 365 days, 6 hours, 12 minutes and about 36 seconds, some 3.4 minutes longer than the circuit measured here. A return worked by adding that year to the birth moment again and again lands another 3.4 minutes later than the ephemeris return with each year. By the 36th birthday it is about 2 h 04 min out. For the August birth that would put the 2026 varsh pravesh at 18:00 instead of 15:56, with a Capricorn lagna at Delhi in place of Sagittarius.

Why the Varsh Lagna Jumps Two to Four Signs

Six hours is a quarter of the Earth’s turn, so about a quarter of the zodiac crosses the eastern horizon between one year’s clock time and the next. That would be three signs if every sign took two hours to cross, but at Delhi’s latitude some signs cross in well under two hours and others take well over. Across the two worked births the varsh lagna at Delhi moved on by two signs at 17 of these yearly steps, by three at 64 and by four at 25. It never stayed in the same sign or moved by one. The other five of the 111 steps have a lagna within half a degree of a sign boundary, too close to call when the instant is cut to the minute. How long each sign takes at different latitudes is on the page about how often the lagna changes.

The place matters too. At the 2027 return of the August birth, 15 August 2027 at 22:08, the lagna is Aries (Mesha) at Delhi and also at Kolkata and Chennai, but Pisces (Meena) at Mumbai. Practice differs on which place to use, the birthplace or the place where the person is when the Sun returns. The instant does not change with the place. Only the lagna and the houses do.

The Varsh Pravesh Is Not Always on the Birthday

For the August birth, the return falls on 15 August in 56 of the 62 years from 1991 to 2052. It falls on 14 August in 1992 and 1996, and on 16 August in 2039, 2043, 2047 and 2051. The early ones are leap years at the start of the span: the leap day pulled the return back across midnight, to 14 August at 22:55 in 1992 and 23:34 in 1996, and from 2000 (00:18 on the 15th) the slow drift keeps it after midnight. That drift is also why the late ones come at the far end of the span: the circuit is about 9 minutes longer than the 365¼ days the calendar averages between 1901 and 2099, and those minutes add up over the decades.

For a birth late in the evening, the six-hour shift carries even the first return past midnight. The second worked birth is 3 January 2001 at 23:40 IST, New Delhi, with the Sun at Sagittarius 19°34′ and a Virgo lagna. Its varsh pravesh never falls on 3 January. It falls on 4 January in 48 of its 51 years, and on 5 January in 2044, 2048 and 2052.

The next varsh pravesh of either illustration is this one’s 2027 return, on 4 January 2027 at 15:34. The August birth’s most recent one was 15 August 2026.

Vedic and Western Solar Returns Are Different Moments

Western astrology also casts a chart for the Sun’s return, but to its tropical degree, measured from the equinox. The equinox drifts backwards against the stars, so the Sun reaches its tropical birth degree a little sooner each year than its sidereal one. The gap grows with every year of age, by about 21 minutes a year for the August birth and about 20 for the January one; the rate depends on how fast the Sun is moving at the birth degree. For the August birth:

At the first birthday the two returns are 21 minutes apart. At 36 they are 12 h 33 min apart, and by 2052 the gap is 21 h 39 min, close to a whole day, so the western return often falls on the date before the Vedic one. A solar-return chart from western software is therefore not a varshphal with a different ayanamsa. It is a chart for another moment. For the August birth, its Delhi lagna is in a different sign from the varsh lagna in every year from 1994 on except 2002 and 2043, when one of the two lagnas is too near a sign boundary to call. Precession is also behind the larger offset in the Vedic Sun sign dates: there the whole ayanamsa, about 24°, puts them more than three weeks behind the western ones.

Muntha: One Sign a Year From the Birth Lagna

The muntha is a point the Tajik texts add to the annual chart. The Tajika Nilakanthi’s rule is plain arithmetic: at birth the muntha is in the lagna’s sign, and it moves one sign on for each completed year. So after n completed years it sits n signs on from the birth lagna, and it comes back to the birth lagna’s sign at 12, 24, 36 and every twelfth year after. For the August birth, with a Virgo lagna, the muntha of the year that began at 36 is Virgo again. Its lord is the sign’s ruler, Mercury for Virgo. The text then reads the muntha by the house it occupies in the annual chart, counted from the varsh lagna. That house changes every year, because the varsh lagna jumps and the muntha moves one sign at a time.

The house numbers are whole-sign counts, as in the site’s other charts; the Tajik texts’ own house division can differ. This page gives no reading of any muntha house.

Finding Your Own Varsh Pravesh

Start with the Sun’s sidereal position at your birth. The free kundli prints it with the birth details (you sign in first), as a longitude from 0° Aries cut to the arcminute, which pins the return only to within about 25 minutes. The Janam Kundli report gives it with the degrees of the other grahas from the Moon to Saturn. The varsh pravesh is the moment in the current year when the Sun is back at that degree. Any software that casts a varshphal finds it for you, but check that it uses the Lahiri ayanamsa. At the two worked returns the Sun covers one arcminute in about 24 to 25 minutes of clock time, so software set to an ayanamsa a fraction of a degree away gives a return hours away. Software set to the tropical zodiac gives the western return from the section above.

Once you have the instant, the ascendant calculator gives the varsh lagna for it at any listed city, with the degree and how near it sits to a sign boundary. The muntha needs only your birth lagna and your age. How the birth lagna itself is found is set out in the guide to reading a kundli, and the ayanamsa is explained on the Lahiri ayanamsa page.

Lal Kitab Uses the Word Differently

Lal Kitab uses the word varshphal too, but its varshphal is not a chart cast at any instant. It takes the birth chart and moves each graha from its birth house to another house by a fixed table for each year of age, so it has no varsh pravesh and nothing on this page applies to it.

What This Page Does Not Give

The Tajik annual chart has much more machinery: a lord of the year chosen from several candidates, the sahams, its own scheme of aspects, and the mudda dasha that divides the year. None of it is computed here, and this page says nothing about what any year will bring. Its instants are for the Lahiri ayanamsa and are cut to the minute, and a lagna within half a degree of a boundary is left undecided. In Hindi: वर्षफल कुंडली कैसे बनती है: वर्ष प्रवेश का समय और मुंथा.

In Brief

• Varsh pravesh: the instant the sidereal Sun returns to its birth degree; the varshphal is cast for it
• Yearly shift in the worked births: 365 days plus 6 h 01 min to 6 h 18 min, so about six hours later each common year and about eighteen hours earlier after a leap day
• Varsh lagna: two to four signs further on each year at Delhi in the worked births, and it depends on the place the chart is cast for
• Date: from the day before the birthday to two days after it in the worked births
• Western solar return: earlier by about 20 to 21 minutes per year of age in the worked births
• Muntha: the birth lagna’s sign plus one sign per completed year