Free birth chart (kundali)

What a kundali actually is

A birth chart is a map of where the nine grahas stood, from your birthplace, at the minute you were born. That is all it is, and it is worth saying plainly, because a great deal of what surrounds astrology depends on the chart itself seeming mysterious. It is not. It is a table of positions and a diagram of those positions, and any two people computing it properly from the same birth details will get the same answer.

The interpretation is where astrologers differ, and where judgement lives. The arithmetic is not in dispute. So we give the arithmetic away.

Three things it takes, and why each one matters

• The date fixes the slow planets. Jupiter takes twelve years to go round, Saturn twenty-nine and a half, so their signs are settled by the date alone and nothing else can move them.
• The time fixes the ascendant and therefore every house. The rising sign changes about every two hours, and when it moves, every planet in the chart changes house with it. This is the one field where being wrong is expensive.
• The place fixes both, through longitude and the clock. The same instant is a different local time — and a different rising sign — in Chandigarh and in Chennai.

Reading the square

The diagram above is a North Indian chart, and it works in a way that surprises people who assume it is like a western wheel.

The houses are fixed and the signs move. The diamond at the top centre is always the first house. The one to its left is always the second, and so on anticlockwise. What changes from chart to chart is the sign NUMBER written into each box — the first house carries your ascendant's number, and the rest follow in order.

That is the opposite of the South Indian square, where the signs are fixed in the same positions on every chart and the ascendant is marked. Both are correct; they are different notations for the same data, and mistaking one for the other produces a diagram that looks right and means something else entirely.

The two places your chart is most likely to be wrong

Every free kundli page gives you a chart. Ours also tells you where that chart is fragile, because a chart handed over without its uncertainty is a chart that will start an argument later.

The Moon near a nakshatra boundary. The Moon crosses into a new nakshatra roughly every twenty-three hours. If your birth fell close to one of those crossings, your birth star — and with it your entire dasha timeline — depends on a birth time that was very probably rounded when it was recorded. We print the two clock times that bracket your nakshatra so you can judge it yourself.

The ascendant near a sign change. Two hours is the average, not the rule — signs of long and short ascension differ a great deal, and at higher latitudes dramatically. Our ascendant calculator gives you the exact window of birth times that would produce the same rising sign.

Why your chart may differ from one you already have

Four reasons, and all four are visible in what this page prints.

• Sidereal or tropical. We compute sidereal, measured from the fixed stars, as jyotisha does. A tropical chart measures from the equinox and currently sits about twenty-four degrees away, which moves most planets a full sign.
• Which ayanamsa. We use Lahiri, the Indian official standard. Raman and Krishnamurti differ from it by up to about two degrees — rarely enough to move a sign, often enough to move a pada.
• Which house system. We use whole-sign houses, the traditional jyotisha method: the whole of your rising sign is the first house. A system that divides houses by time will place several planets in different houses.
• The timezone actually in force. Daylight saving, wartime clocks and historic offsets are computed for your specific date rather than read off a modern table. An hour's error here moves the ascendant outright.

What retrograde and dignity mean in the table

Two marks in the graha table are worth explaining, because both get over-read.

Retrograde means the planet appeared to move backwards against the stars as seen from Earth — an effect of the two orbits, not a change in the planet. Jyotisha reads a retrograde graha as intensified and turned inward rather than as damaged. Rahu and Ketu are always retrograde by definition and are not marked.

Dignity — exalted, own sign, debilitated — is a statement about how comfortably a planet sits in the sign it is in, not a score for your life. A debilitated planet in a strong house with good aspects is not a problem, and the classical literature spends a great deal of effort on exactly that qualification.

What we sell, and why the chart is not it

The chart above is the whole computation and it is yours. Take it to any astrologer and have it checked; that is what it is for.

What we sell is the reading: about ninety pages that take these positions and work through them — the sixteen divisional charts, the yogas with the verse each one rests on, the dasha timeline with readings for each period, the ashtakavarga strengths, and the printed granth if you want it on paper. That is judgement applied to arithmetic, and it is the part that takes work.

Handing over the chart and charging for the reading is the honest split. The alternative — hiding the arithmetic so that the arithmetic feels like the product — is how a lot of this trade works, and it is not how we would like to.

Common questions

Is this the same chart the paid booklet uses?

Yes, exactly — the same engine, the same ephemeris, the same ayanamsa. The booklet adds the reading, not a different chart.

I do not know my birth time

Then the ascendant and the houses are genuinely unknown — over a day the rising sign is every one of the twelve at some point. The Moon, the nakshatra and the dasha are far more forgiving, and those are worth having on their own. Run it with a noon estimate and read the boundaries rather than the placements.

Can I print this?

Yes — it is a normal page, so your browser's print will take it. The typeset granth edition, with the divisional charts and the readings, is the Life Kundali.

Do you keep my birth details?

No. The details come in for the computation and are dropped when the answer goes back. No account, no email, nothing written anywhere — which is why there is no consent box on the form.