What is a ghati? The sixty parts of the Vedic day

A ghati is one of the sixty parts into which the panchang, the traditional Hindu almanac, divides a day and night. Counted across the whole cycle from one sunrise to the next, a ghati lasts about twenty-four minutes. The word is also written ghatika, its fuller Sanskrit form, and ghadi, and Tamil calendars call the same unit the nazhigai.

Ghatis are still how many panchangs give the length of the day, and how a traditional horoscope records the moment of birth. Two ways of counting them are in use, and they agree only when day and night are the same length. This note covers the word, the units around it, the two counts, turning ghatis and palas into clock time, and where the ghati sits among the other divisions of the day.

What a ghati is

The name comes from the water clock. Ghata is Sanskrit for a pot, and the ghatika was a small bowl with a hole in its base which, set floating in water, slowly filled and sank in one ghati. The unit outlived the instrument: in Hindi, ghadi now means any clock or watch.

Sixty runs through the whole scheme: sixty ghatis make a day and night, sixty palas a ghati, and sixty vipalas a pala. Going the other way, two ghatis make a muhurta, the traditional thirtieth of a day and night, which is why some panchangs list the thirty muhurtas as the do ghati muhurtas, do being Hindi for two.

The choghadiya takes its name from the same unit. The word is usually explained as four ghadi, and a choghadiya part, an eighth of the daylight or of the night, averages a little under four ghatis across the cycle. What is choghadiya? sets out how its eight parts are named.

Two ways of counting the sixty

Every count of ghatis starts at the local sunrise, because the panchang day runs from one sunrise to the next; The Vedic day: why it starts at sunrise sets out that reckoning. From there, two conventions divide the cycle.

• The sixty-part count. The whole cycle, sunrise to sunrise, is cut into sixty equal ghatis. Each lasts almost exactly twenty-four minutes, since one sunrise to the next is seldom exactly twenty-four hours, and the ghati at which sunset falls moves through the year. A traditional horoscope records the moment of birth in this count, as so many ghatis and palas after sunrise, a figure known as the ishtakala.
• The thirty-part count. The daylight is cut into thirty equal ghatis and the night into thirty more, so sunset always falls at thirty. A daylight ghati is then a thirtieth of the real daylight, stretching in summer and shrinking in winter, and a night ghati does the reverse. Timings worked out from the length of the daylight, as muhurtas are, follow this count.

When the daylight and the night are the same length, the two counts agree exactly. The more uneven they are, the further the counts drift apart, as this example with round illustrative figures shows.

A traditional panchang gives the length of the day, the dinamana, in ghatis and palas of the sixty-part count, and the length of the night, the ratrimana, is what remains of the sixty: on the example day, thirty-five ghatis and twenty-five.

Turning ghatis and palas into clock time

Ghati figures are counted from sunrise, so converting one needs the local sunrise for the day in question and a little multiplication. For a figure in the sixty-part count:

1. Multiply the ghatis by twenty-four to get minutes.
2. Multiply the palas by twenty-four to get seconds.
3. Count that far forward from the local sunrise.

A worked example, with round illustrative figures: a panchang gives the end of a tithi, the lunar day, as 25 ghatis 30 palas. Twenty-five ghatis are 600 minutes, and thirty palas are 720 seconds, or 12 minutes, so the tithi ends 612 minutes, ten hours and twelve minutes, after that morning's sunrise. As a quick check, two and a half ghatis make an hour.

Going the other way, divide the minutes since sunrise by twenty-four. The whole number is the ghatis, and the minutes left over, multiplied by two and a half, are the palas. A moment 400 minutes after sunrise is 16 ghatis with 16 minutes over, and 16 minutes are 40 palas, which gives 16 ghatis 40 palas.

A figure in the thirty-part count needs the day's own ghati in place of twenty-four minutes: the daylight in minutes divided by thirty, or the night divided by thirty for a night figure. On the example summer day, fifteen daylight ghatis are 420 minutes, the exact middle of the daylight, and that is where the abhijit muhurta sits: it spans the fifteenth and sixteenth ghatis, from fourteen to sixteen ghatis after sunrise. The note on abhijit muhurta works through that span.

The counts do not mix. On the example day, fifteen ghatis means 360 minutes after sunrise in the sixty-part count and 420 in the thirty-part count, an hour apart, so where a source does not say which it uses, check before converting.

The ghati inside the other divisions of the day

The thirty-part count shares out the same daylight as the other traditional divisions, so each of them comes to a fixed number of its ghatis whatever the season:

• Muhurta: two ghatis, a fifteenth of the daylight or of the night. What is a muhurat? covers the thirty muhurtas and the word's other sense.
• Hora: two and a half ghatis, a twelfth of the daylight or of the night, each ruled by one of the seven grahas, the moving bodies of traditional astronomy. The note on the hora gives the order of the lords.
• Choghadiya: three and three quarter ghatis, an eighth of the daylight or of the night. Tradition sets aside three of its seven names: Udveg (restlessness), Kaal (time) and Rog (illness).
• Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika: three and three quarter ghatis each, since each fills one eighth of the daylight, with the part set by the weekday. The guide to Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika explains them.

The sixty-part count suits spans pinned to sunrise. The Brahma muhurta, in the convention that fixes it at ninety-six to forty-eight minutes before sunrise, runs from four ghatis of twenty-four minutes before the next sunrise to two. The other convention, the fourteenth of the fifteen night muhurtas, also runs from four night ghatis before sunrise to two; the two differ only in how long a ghati is. The note on Brahma muhurta covers both.

How Sumuhurta relates to the ghati

Sumuhurta, the iPhone app this site is about, calculates sunrise, sunset and the next sunrise for your place on the phone, checks the whole cycle minute by minute, and labels what it finds with clock times rather than ghatis. The divisions it reads follow the two counts above. Choghadiya and hora are fractions of the real daylight and night, as in the thirty-part count, and the abhijit muhurta is the eighth of fifteen equal parts of the daylight, the fifteenth and sixteenth ghatis of that count. The Brahma muhurta is the fixed span from ninety-six to forty-eight minutes before the next sunrise, four ghatis of twenty-four minutes to two. All of this is weighed against the birth chart entered on your phone.

What comes out is not a table but one to three personal windows in each cycle, day or night, running roughly twenty to a hundred and fifty minutes and never crossing sunrise or sunset. Each carries a plain-English quality, Clear run, Sharp or Steady, and a quiet attribution naming the hora and the choghadiya at its middle, in the form Mercury hora · Labh. The rule governing where a window may fall at all reads:

Every personal window Sumuhurta surfaces is calculated to avoid Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda, Gulika, and the Kaal, Rog and Udveg choghadiya periods.

That rule is narrow on purpose. The app does not perform a complete electional-muhurta assessment, the fuller traditional work of choosing a moment for one occasion, which weighs many more factors. It does not replace a full panchang: there is no dinamana or ghati figure on any screen, no table of the thirty muhurtas, no choghadiya or hora tables, and no tithi or nakshatra (one of the 27 star divisions along the Moon's path) tables. It shows no score or rating, never marks any part of the cycle as a bad time, and does not predict outcomes. For figures in ghatis and palas, a full panchang or a qualified practitioner is the right place to go. How it reads the day covers the rest of the calculation.

Common questions

How many minutes is one ghati?

Twenty-four, in the sixty-part count that divides the whole cycle from sunrise to sunrise. In the thirty-part count a daylight ghati is a thirtieth of the daylight and a night ghati a thirtieth of the night, so either is twenty-four minutes only when day and night are equal.

How many ghatis are there in a day?

Sixty, from one sunrise to the next. In the thirty-part count thirty belong to the daylight and thirty to the night; in the sixty-part count the split moves with the season, which is what the dinamana in a panchang records.

How do I convert ghati and pala to hours?

Multiply the ghatis by twenty-four for minutes and the palas by twenty-four for seconds, then count that far forward from the local sunrise. Two and a half ghatis make one hour, which gives a quick check. This holds for the sixty-part count; for the thirty-part count, use a thirtieth of the day's daylight or night as the ghati.

Is a ghati the same as a muhurta?

No. A muhurta is two ghatis, so the thirty muhurtas and the sixty ghatis share out the same sunrise-to-sunrise cycle.

Does the app show times in ghatis?

No. Its windows carry ordinary clock times, and it shows no ghati, pala or dinamana figures. A full panchang for your city gives those.