Gowri Panchangam Today

The eight Gowri periods

Each period takes its name from the quality it is believed to carry. Amirdha (also written Amirtham or Amritha) means nectar and is the most prized of all; any good work may begin in it. Uthi, short for Udhyogam, points to effort and employment, so it is favoured for joining a job, starting a project or setting out on business. Labam means gain and is chosen for trade, sales and opening accounts. Dhanam means wealth and suits dealings with money, gold and valuables. Sugam means ease and comfort, and households pick it for travel, family functions and settling into a home.

The remaining three are the ones Tamil calendars print in a warning colour. Rogam carries the sense of illness and is avoided for anything to do with health and for beginnings in general. Soram, sometimes spelt Choram, is linked with loss or theft and is avoided for money matters and journeys. Visham, literally poison, is treated as the hardest of the three: a time to finish routine work rather than to start anything that matters.

How the weekday sets the order

Gowri Panchangam does not run one order every day. Each weekday has its own fixed sequence of eight names for the daytime and a second, different sequence for the night, so a Monday morning and a Thursday morning open on different periods, and the evening of a day does not simply carry on from where its afternoon stopped. The weekday table on this page lists all fourteen sequences, seven days and seven nights, exactly as the live periods use them.

Because the Tamil day is counted from sunrise, the night that follows belongs to the same weekday until the next sunrise. That matters after midnight: a period shown at two in the morning on the night table is still read with the previous date's sequence.

Why the times change with your city and the season

Every period is one eighth of the actual daylight or night, so it is rarely exactly ninety minutes long. Around the June solstice the day periods in North India stretch and the night periods shrink; in December the reverse happens, and the swing is smaller in Chennai than in Delhi because day length varies less closer to the equator. Many simplified Gowri charts in circulation print fixed clock times that assume sunrise at six. On a given day those can be off by half an hour or more, which is why this page divides your selected city's real sunrise-to-sunset and sunset-to-sunrise spans instead.

The sunrise, sunset and next-sunrise instants come from the same Drik (Lahiri) panchang computation that drives the rest of this site, so the Gowri boundaries line up exactly with the day's other timings.

Gowri Panchangam is not Choghadiya

North and West India use a related but separate system called Choghadiya. It also cuts the day and the night into eight slots, but it works with seven names, Amrit, Shubh, Labh, Char, Udveg, Rog and Kaal, in sequences tied to the planetary lord of each weekday. Gowri Panchangam has eight names of its own and its own weekday orders, so a slot that reads well in one system can read badly in the other. The two should not be mixed: if your family follows the Tamil calendar, read the Gowri periods; if it follows Choghadiya, use the Choghadiya page.

Tamil daily calendars also print Rahu Kalam, Yamagandam and Kuligai beside the Gowri times. Those three are the same pan-Indian inauspicious segments explained on our Rahu Kaal page, and the card above repeats today's values so you can see whether a good Gowri period overlaps one of them; when it does, families usually prefer another window.

Using Gowri Nalla Neram in practice

Pick the good period whose meaning suits the task: Labam or Dhanam for a purchase or a shop opening, Uthi for joining work, Sugam for a journey or a home function, Amirdha for anything important. Then begin inside it. The custom is about the moment of starting, so a task already under way does not have to stop when a Visham or Rogam period arrives. For a wedding, a house-warming or another major ceremony, families still consult a full muhurtham drawn from the tithi, the nakshatra and the individual horoscopes; Gowri Nalla Neram is the everyday tool for smaller starts within a chosen day.

Gowri Panchangam is a traditional classification of the day, offered for reference. It describes the time, not any one person's chart, and it is not a prediction.

Gowri Panchangam table by weekday

The order of the eight periods for each weekday — the day sequence counted from sunrise, the night sequence from sunset. Good periods are shown in green, the ones to avoid in red.

Frequently asked questions