Choghadiya — the whole system in one page

Choghadiya divides daylight into 8 equal parts and night into 8 more, and labels each from a fixed cycle of 7 names. Because 7 names fill 8 slots, the last repeats the first. A slot is not 90 minutes: in Indian cities it runs 1h 17m to 1h 45m depending on the date and your latitude.

choghadiya, chogadia, choghadiya meaning, shubh choghadiya, chaughadiya

Eight parts of daylight, eight of night, seven names on a fixed cycle. What the labels mean, where the timings come from, and what the system does not claim.

Choghadiya — chogadia, chaughadiya, ચોઘડિયું — is the everyday electional layer of Jyotish, and the only one most people ever use. It answers one question, cheaply: of the next few hours, which are conventionally better to begin something in? It does not need a chart, a priest or a calculation more complicated than a division.

The whole system is three rules. Divide the daylight into eight; label the first part with the weekday’s own ruling planet; walk a fixed seven-name cycle from there. Night is the same three rules from sunset, with a different entry point. Everything else on this page and in this cluster is a consequence of those.

What follows is the mechanism stated once. The sibling pages each take one part of it further — the daytime table, the night table, what changes overnight, and what the arithmetic actually produces in eleven specific Indian cities.

The division: eight parts of daylight, not eight hours

Take the interval from sunrise to sunset and cut it into eight equal parts. That is a day choghadiya. Take sunset to the next sunrise and do the same: that is a night choghadiya. The two are the same length only within a few days of an equinox, and they always sum to 24 hours between them.

This is why "about 90 minutes" is a useful lie and a real source of error. Across the eleven Indian cities in this cluster a daylight slot ranges from 1h 17m to 1h 45m. The city with the widest seasonal variation, New Delhi, sees a single slot change by 27m between the solstices; the steadiest, Bangalore, by 11m.

Longitude adds a second, constant error that has nothing to do with the season. India runs one timezone across nearly 30 degrees, so solar noon in these eleven cities spans 37.9 minutes on an identical clock. A choghadiya table with no city named on it is wrong somewhere, by a fixed amount, all year.

The seven names, and how good "good" is

The cycle is Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog and back to Udveg, each named for a graha. Three are openly auspicious, three are avoided for beginnings, and one — Chal — is the interesting case: favourable, specialised to movement, and measurably the weakest of the favourable four.

The table below prints the ranking our muhurat engine actually uses when it orders candidate windows, rather than the three-colour key most choghadiya pages stop at. Amrit at 0.95 and Chal at 0.72 are both "good"; they are not the same recommendation.

Choghadiya	Lord	Reading	Engine subscore
Amrit	Moon	favourable	0.95
Shubh	Jupiter	favourable	0.88
Labh	Mercury	favourable	0.85
Chal	Venus	favourable	0.72
Udveg	Sun	avoid for starts	0.38
Rog	Mars	avoid for starts	0.35
Kaal	Saturn	avoid for starts	0.32

Subscores are AskSoma’s internal ranking weights, published because a number is more honest than a colour. They order preferences; they do not predict outcomes.

The naming rule: your weekday picks the entry point

The first daylight slot always belongs to the weekday’s ruling planet. Sunday is the Sun’s, so it opens on Udveg; Monday is the Moon’s, so it opens on Amrit; Thursday is Jupiter’s, so it opens on Shubh. From there the cycle runs in fixed order regardless of the day.

Read down the week and the openers advance 3 places along the cycle each day — the same step that governs the hora sequence, and the reason the entry points look scattered when they are not.

Night has its own entry point, and one rule generates all seven: a weekday’s night opens on the choghadiya of the weekday 4 days later. Sunday night runs on Thursday’s Shubh. That is the single fact that makes the night table memorable rather than a second thing to memorise.

A consequence worth stating because nobody does: every weekday’s daylight contains all 7 names plus a repeat of its opener, so its favourability is 4.45 + the opener, and nothing else. Monday is the strongest daylight of the week and Saturday the weakest, purely because of where each one starts.

Where choghadiya sits among the other timing layers

Choghadiya is the cheapest layer and the lowest-ranked. Above it sit Rahu Kaal and the other sunrise-referenced kaals, which override a favourable choghadiya outright; above those, the panchang’s five angas; above those, a properly elected muhurat for the specific act; and above all of it, your own dasha and transits, which choghadiya knows nothing about.

That ordering is not a demotion — it is what makes the system usable. You reach for choghadiya precisely when the decision is too small to elect a muhurat for. Using it for a wedding date is a category error in the other direction.

It also means a "bad" choghadiya is never a prohibition. The tradition’s claim is comparative: given two otherwise equal moments, prefer the one in Amrit. Anything stronger than that is folklore that grew on top of a division rule.

The shortest complete example: one slot, start to finish

Everything the system needs is a weekday, a sunrise and a sunset. This is the whole procedure on one arbitrary case, so the rest of the cluster can assume it.

Step	Value
Weekday	Thursday — ruled by Jupiter
Sunrise and sunset	06:30 and 18:30 — twelve hours of daylight
Divide by eight	720 ÷ 8 = 90 minutes per slot (a round number only because this example was chosen to be)
First slot	Shubh — Jupiter’s choghadiya, because Thursday is Jupiter’s day — running 06:30 to 08:00
Walk the cycle	Shubh, Rog, Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, and Shubh again as the eighth
Read a time	14:00 falls in the sixth slot, 13:30–15:00 — Amrit

Thursday 14:00, on a twelve-hour day, is Amrit — the most favourable name in the set. The only thing that would change that answer is a different weekday or a different sunrise; the cycle itself never varies.

Twelve hours of daylight is an equinox. On any other date the division does not land on round numbers, which is exactly why the city pages in this cluster exist.

Frequently asked

What is choghadiya?

A folk-electional system that divides daylight into 8 equal parts and night into 8 more, labelling each from a fixed cycle of 7 names — Udveg, Chal, Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog. Three are auspicious for beginnings, three are avoided, and Chal is favourable specifically for things that move.

Which choghadiya is the most auspicious?

Amrit, ruled by the Moon, which our engine scores at 0.95 against 0.88 for Shubh and 0.85 for Labh. For a commercial start, though, tradition reaches for Labh first regardless of the ranking.

How many choghadiya are there in a day?

Sixteen — eight in daylight and eight at night — drawn from 7 names, which is why the eighth slot of each half repeats the first.

How long is one choghadiya?

One eighth of the daylight where you are, so it is only 90 minutes at an equinox. Across the eleven Indian cities on this site a daylight slot runs 1h 17m to 1h 45m, and the night slot moves the opposite way.

Is choghadiya the same as Rahu Kaal?

No, though both divide daylight into eight. Rahu Kaal is a single one of those eighths, chosen by weekday, and it is treated as a hard avoidance that overrides a favourable choghadiya. Choghadiya labels all eight, and only expresses a preference.

Does choghadiya need my birth chart?

No, and that is the point. It uses only the weekday and your local sunrise and sunset, so everyone in the same city reads the same table. Anything that claims a personalised choghadiya has added something the system does not contain.

What this page can NOT tell you

• Choghadiya cannot tell you whether something will work. It is a preference ordering over moments, applied identically to everyone, with no knowledge of the task or the person.
• It is a regional folk convention with real variants. The favourable/unfavourable split here is the common one; Kaal in particular is treated differently in parts of Gujarat, and a family tradition that disagrees with this page is not necessarily wrong.
• It ranks below Rahu Kaal, below the panchang, below a properly elected muhurat and below your own dasha. A favourable slot does not override any of them.
• The clock times depend entirely on local sunrise. Any table that gives you a time without asking where you are has assumed a city, and it is probably not yours.
• The subscores published here are our internal ranking weights for ordering muhurat windows. They describe how our engine chooses; they are not a measurement of the world.

Choghadiya is a folk-electional convention, not a prediction. It labels slices of the day by tradition; it does not know what you are doing, who you are, or how it turned out. Treat a label as a preference, and never as permission or prohibition.

How AskSoma computes and what we refuse to claim · Engine: NOAA solar position (sunrise/sunset), ±1 minute against published almanac times · Ayanamsa: not used — choghadiya is a sunrise-to-sunset division, with no sidereal component · Content reviewed 2026-08-08