The Sun's Two Roads

There is a deathbed in the Mahabharata that the whole tradition remembers. The grandsire Bhishma, pierced through with arrows, lies on the battlefield and will not die. He has the power to choose his hour, and he is waiting. He is waiting for the sun to turn north.

Only when the sun has begun its northward course, the auspicious road, does he let go.

A man postpones his own death for the sake of a direction in the sky. To understand why, you have to leave the moon behind for a chapter and follow the sun.

The two courses

The moon gives the Hindu calendar its months. The sun gives it its year, and the year has a shape.

Across the year the point where the sun rises does not stay still on the horizon. For six months it creeps north, the days lengthening toward the long light of summer. For the next six it slides south, the days shortening into winter. The tradition names these two halves the two ayanas, the sun’s two courses, two roads it walks in turn.

The northward road is uttarayana. It runs, in the traditional reckoning, from the depth of winter toward the height of summer, the half of growing light. The tradition calls it the auspicious half, the devayana, the day of the gods. The southward road is dakshinayana, the half of failing light, the night of the gods. This is the direction Bhishma waited for. The Bhagavad Gita, in K. T. Telang’s translation of verse 8.24, marks the same path: those who depart the world in fire, in light, in the daytime, in the bright fortnight, in the six months of the northern course, go by that road to Brahman. The northward sun is the road of return.

So the year is not a featureless circle. It has a bright half and a dark half, a road of ascent and a road of descent, and the festivals know which half they stand in.

The turnings

The sun’s slow walk along the horizon is mapped, like everything else in this calendar, against the zodiac. As the sun crosses from one sign into the next, the moment of crossing is a sankranti, a transition. There are twelve in the year, one for each sign.

Most pass without ceremony. One is a festival across the whole subcontinent.

Makara Sankranti is the sun’s entry into Makara, the sign of Capricorn, around the middle of January. It marks, in the tradition, the beginning of uttarayana, the turn onto the northward road, and it is kept with bonfires, kites, sesame sweets, and bathing in cold rivers from Tamil Nadu to the Punjab. A later chapter follows that festival into its many regional forms. Here it serves to introduce a problem the calendar has been quietly carrying, and that an honest treatise has to face.

Makara Sankranti is supposed to mark the winter turn, the moment the days begin to lengthen. But the days actually begin to lengthen at the winter solstice, around the twenty-second of December. The festival now falls more than three weeks later, in mid-January. The two have come apart.

The reason is one of the most beautiful and humbling facts in astronomy. The earth wobbles on its axis like a slowing top, one full wobble every twenty-six thousand years, and this precession of the equinoxes slowly slides the seasons against the fixed stars. The Hindu calendar measures the sun’s position against the stars, the sidereal zodiac, holding the sign of Makara fixed to its constellation. The solstice is measured against the seasons. Over the centuries these two frames drift apart, by about one day every seventy years, and they have now separated by some twenty-three days. Roughly seventeen centuries ago, the entry into sidereal Makara and the actual solstice coincided. Since then they have parted.

The tradition has kept the rite. It bathes and lights its fires on the day the sun enters the star-fixed sign, even though the sun’s seasonal turn now happens earlier. This tells you something the rest of the treatise will keep confirming. Where there is a choice between astronomical exactness and the continuity of the observance, the tradition tends to keep the observance. It is faithful to the appointment even after the sky has moved the meeting. There is a live internal debate about this, between those who reckon by the stars and those who would correct to the seasons, and it is not settled. The treatise names the divergence and leaves it standing.

The extra month

Now to the deepest piece of engineering in the whole calendar, the device that the previous chapter promised.

A lunar year of twelve moons is about 354 days. A solar year is about 365. Every year the moon’s calendar falls eleven days behind the sun’s. Left alone, this gap would do to the Hindu calendar what it does to the Islamic one: the festivals would walk backward through the seasons, Diwali drifting out of autumn, Holi out of spring, the whole year coming loose from the weather it belongs to. In about three years the gap grows to a full lunar month.

The calendar swallows the gap by inserting an extra month.

Roughly every thirty-three months, a thirteenth lunar month is added to the year. The rule that triggers it is elegant. Each solar month, the sun enters one zodiac sign, one sankranti. Almost every lunar month contains one such entry. But because lunar months are slightly shorter, now and then a lunar month slips entirely between two sankrantis and contains none. That month, the one with no solar transition inside it, is declared the adhika masa, the extra month, and the year that holds it runs to thirteen moons. The festivals of the doubled month are observed in its second, regular half, and the calendar is hauled back into step with the sun.

The tradition did not treat this correction as mere bookkeeping. It made the extra month holy. It is called the purushottama masa, the month of the Supreme, said to have been claimed by Vishnu himself because no other deity would take a month so irregular. A season of extra devotion is folded into the very gear that keeps the year true. The rarer opposite case, where a single lunar month manages to contain two sankrantis, produces a suppressed month, a kshaya masa, and the calendar shortens to compensate. The machine breathes in and out, adding and dropping months across the years, and the net effect is that the festivals never leave their seasons.

This is the answer to the wandering of the dates. They drift against the Western calendar within each year, by the eleven-day lunar shortfall, and then the extra month resets them. Diwali is always in autumn. Holi is always in spring. The moon gives the precise night; the sun, through the extra month, keeps the night in its proper season. Two clocks, held together by a thirteenth month inserted whenever they threaten to part.

Counting the years

One last layer. Above the months and the ayanas sits the count of the years themselves, and here too the tradition keeps more than one reckoning.

The two great eras are the Vikram Samvat and the Shaka Samvat. The Vikram era is conventionally counted from 57 BCE, which makes its year run about fifty-seven ahead of the Common Era; it is the calendar of much of the north and of Nepal. The Shaka era is counted from 78 CE, running about seventy-eight behind the Common Era. The founding stories of both, a victory by a king Vikramaditya, an era begun by a Shaka ruler, are debated by historians and held loosely here. There are regional eras besides, the Bengali, the Tamil, the Malayalam Kollam era reckoned from 825 CE, each counting its own years.

In the twentieth century the new republic tried to bring order to this plurality. A committee under the physicist Meghnad Saha studied the calendars and, in 1955, recommended a reformed Shaka calendar for civil use. It was adopted in 1957 as India’s national calendar. But the reform touched only official life. The festivals stayed where they had always been, fixed by the regional almanacs to the moon and the stars. The civil calendar was standardised. The sacred year was left gloriously plural, and it remains so.

So the sun gives the calendar its two roads and its seasons, the extra month keeps the moon’s festivals from sliding out of those seasons, and the eras count the turning years above it all. The machine is now fully open. The reader can read any date in this treatise: a tithi in a paksha in a masa, set in its ayana, counted in its era.

The last chapter of this volume comes down from the year to the month and the day, to the rhythms a devotee actually lives. For the calendar is not only a thing to read. It is a thing to keep.