What is Rahu Kaal?
Rahu Kaal is one-eighth of the daylight hours, assigned by weekday, that tradition sets aside as unfavourable for STARTING new ventures — and it changes with your city's sunrise.
2-minute read · plain language
How it's computed
Take the time from local sunrise to sunset and divide it into eight equal parts. Each weekday assigns one fixed part to Rāhu: Monday the 2nd, Saturday the 3rd, Friday the 4th, Wednesday the 5th, Thursday the 6th, Tuesday the 7th, Sunday the 8th. Pure arithmetic on the day's real sunrise and sunset.
Why it differs by city
Because sunrise differs by city. Delhi and Mumbai have different daylight windows on the same date, so their Rahu Kaal windows differ by many minutes — a printed all-India time is an approximation.
What tradition does with it
The convention is about beginnings — the tradition avoids launching a venture, journey or ceremony inside the window. Ongoing work is not the concern.
The honest part
Rahu Kaal is deterministic arithmetic on sunrise — every panchāṅga computes the same thing (differences are just sunrise conventions). Whether one observes it is cultural practice; there is nothing to fear inside the window, and the tradition itself only speaks about the timing of beginnings.
Common questions
Is Rahu Kaal the same all over India?
No — it follows local sunrise. The weekday pattern is fixed; the clock times shift city by city.
Does it apply at night?
The classical convention is a daylight division. Some lineages compute a night analogue, but the commonly observed Rahu Kaal is sunrise-to-sunset arithmetic.
Where do these fall in your chart? AstroAmrit maps every sky event onto your own birth chart — which house it touches, which of your planets it meets — with every claim cited to the computation behind it.
See these in your chart →How this table was computed
AstroAmrit is a glass box: every number on this page is reproducible from the stated method. These are astronomical facts, not predictions. Times are instants of the event's global maximum or exact crossing; your local civil date can differ by one day depending on timezone.