Kolkata Panchang, 1 January 2026

The five windows in Kolkata on 1 January 2026

In clock order through the day. Which numbered eighth of daylight Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta each take is fixed by the weekday rather than by the clock, and no two weekdays share the assignment: on a Thursday Rahu Kaal is the 6th of the eight, Gulika the 3rd and Yamaghanta the 1st. Sunrise 06:16 to sunset 17:03 is 10h 47m, so an eighth of it runs 80.9 minutes and a fifteenth — which is what Abhijit is — runs 43 minutes. The Length column is the gap between two endpoints each rounded to the whole minute, which is why the three eighths below read 81 minutes apiece.

The convention the classical almanacs record is that nothing new is begun inside Rahu Kaal, Gulika or Yamaghanta, and that Abhijit and Brahma muhurat are the day’s two settled windows — Brahma muhurat being the ninety-six minutes ending at sunrise, which is why it is the one window here whose length never changes with the season. What the tradition does not do is grade the rest of the day, and neither does this page. Choosing a window for a purpose needs a chart as well as a clock.

What a national panchang gets wrong in Kolkata today

The column on the right is the site’s own national table for 1 January 2026, computed for New Delhi from the JPL DE421 ephemeris — the numbers /panchang/2026-01-01/ actually prints. It is the same table almost every panchang in the vertical is a copy of. Every limb on it is right for Kolkata; every time on it is wrong, and the last column is by how much.

The widest of them on 1 January 2026 is Sunrise, which a national table places 57 minutes later than Kolkata's. Longitude explains most of it: Kolkata sits 11.15° east of New Delhi, and four minutes per degree is the whole of the local-time correction. The rest is latitude, which does not shift sunrise so much as stretch the day — and because Rahu Kaal is a fraction of that day rather than a span on a clock, a stretched day moves the window further than it moves sunrise. That is why the difference in the table above is not one number repeated seven times.

An eighth of the day is not ninety minutes

Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta are each one eighth of the interval from sunrise to sunset. That is a definition, not an approximation, and it means the length of each is a property of the day rather than a fixed quantity anyone can print once. A table quoting a flat ninety minutes is therefore wrong here today by 9 minutes, and wrong in the long direction — it keeps it open past its end. Across 2026 in Kolkata an eighth runs from 80 minutes to 102 minutes, so the error is not a constant either. Abhijit is a fifteenth of the same interval rather than an eighth, so it runs 43 minutes today — a little over half of Rahu Kaal, and it moves with local solar noon rather than with the clock. Brahma muhurat is the exception: fixed at 96 minutes because it is defined as a span before sunrise rather than a fraction of daylight, so in Kolkata it shifts with sunrise and never changes length.

Where 1 January sits in Kolkata’s year

10h 47m of daylight is the 342nd longest of Kolkata’s 365 days in 2026. The year’s longest sits 165 minutes above it, on 22 June; its shortest 2 minutes below, on 16 December and 6 other days at the same length. This is the first date the committed table covers, so there is no previous day to compare it with here. Nothing is extrapolated backwards past it.

Of the eight cities in this cluster, Kolkata is the 1st to see the sun on 1 January 2026. Sunrise across the eight spans 64 minutes, from 06:16 in Kolkata to 07:20 in Ahmedabad — and Rahu Kaal’s opening spans 64 minutes, which is the more useful of the two numbers and the one no national table can carry.

The five limbs on 1 January 2026

These five are the same everywhere in India, and they are listed here for completeness rather than because they vary by city — a tithi is an angular relationship between the Sun and the Moon, and an angle does not have a postal address. One caveat is honest and worth stating: the almanac convention is to read each limb at sunrise, and the tabulated values above are read at New Delhi's sunrise. Kolkata’s sunrise is 57 minutes earlier than that, so on a day when a limb turns over inside that gap, the value current at Kolkata’s own sunrise is the neighbouring one. The site does not guess which days those are; where a limb is close to its boundary the honest place to look is the neighbouring-day view on the national page for 1 January 2026, which shows the days on either side for exactly this reason.

1 January 2026 in eight cities

East to west, in the order the sun reaches them. The last column is measured from Kolkata, so this table is a different table on each of the eight pages that share this date.

The two columns do not run in the same order, and 1 January 2026 is one of the dates where that is visible: Mumbai sees the sun before Delhi and still reaches Rahu Kaal 22 minutes after it. The reason is in the fourth column. Both cities take the same numbered eighth on a Thursday, but Delhi’s eighth is 78 minutes against 83 in Mumbai, and several eighths of that difference accumulate before the window opens. A shorter day reaches its own afternoon sooner.

Worth noting about 1 January 2026

• 06:16 is the earliest sunrise Kolkata sees in January 2026, held on 5 days of the month at the same minute.

Questions about Kolkata on 1 January 2026