Varshaphal Annual Chart

What this long-form adds to the Varshaphal calculator

The calculator above casts one annual chart and prints its return instant, its rising sign, the Muntha and four resolved year-lord candidates. The short copy around it explains the search, the Muntha count and three limits, and works one example. This section goes further in a different direction: it follows one invented person through twelve consecutive annual charts, so you can watch the Muntha walk through the houses and the return instant drift around the clock; it measures how much a few minutes of birth-time error move the result; it shows the December-birthday case where the chart running today is last year's; it lays out the house categories and dignity labels the candidates carry, rule by rule; and it says plainly what the classical texts in this app's library do and do not contain on the subject. Every number below came from this app's own engine, run in scripts written for this page.

If you have not yet cast your birth chart, the birth chart calculator is the place to start. Everything here is built on the natal chart: the Sun's birth longitude sets the target the return has to hit, and the natal ascendant (Lagna) is where the Muntha starts counting.

What the library behind this app says about the year

Varshaphal as the calculator casts it - a solar-return chart, a Muntha and a Varshesha chosen among candidates - belongs to the Tajika tradition. It is worth being direct about the sources: the classical and modern texts this app draws on contain no Tajika treatise. A search of the library for Tajika, Muntha, Varshesha, Panchavargiya, Hadda, solar return and annual chart finds nothing. The engine's own header says the same thing from the other side: it computes the return, the chart, the Muntha and the candidates, and it refuses to pick the year lord because the strength contest that decides it is not built.

What the library does contain is a nearby but different idea of a year lord, and it is useful to know about because it explains why a weekday appears in the candidate list at all.

BPHS: the Varsh lord inside Kala Bala

In Ch. 27, on the evaluation of strengths, BPHS lists Varsh-Maas-Dina-Hora Bal as one part of time strength (Sl. 13). The lords of the year, the month, the day and the hour receive 15, 30, 45 and 60 virupas respectively. The Varsh lord there is defined as the lord of the weekday on which the astrological year of birth starts, and the text derives that weekday from the Ahargana - a count of days from the beginning of creation, divided and reduced by a stated procedure. That is a component of planetary strength in the birth chart, counted from a cosmological epoch. It is not a solar return, and nothing in the chapter connects it to an annual chart. This app's Shad Bala calculator uses a simplified twenty-point Shad Bala and does not compute this virupa term.

Saravali: lords of the year, month, week and hour

Saravali comes at the same idea twice. In Ch. 5 (Sl. 42) it says the lords of the year, month, week and Hora improve happiness, wealth and fame in their dashas, each two-fold over the one before - the month lord doubling the year lord, and so on up to the Hora lord. In Ch. 7 (Sl. 1-3) it names the year lord as the planet ruling the first weekday of the month of Aswina, and says the fourth planet counted from one year's lord rules the next. Sl. 5-6 then grade how much a bhava's good effects are helped when an enterprise is begun on a time ruled by that bhava's lord: 25 per cent by the year lord, 50 by the month lord, 75 by the weekday lord and 100 by the Hora lord.

Again, this is a calendar-based scheme - Aswina, weekdays, Horas - and not a return chart. Neither BPHS nor Saravali, as they appear in this library, mentions a Muntha, a Panchavargiya Bala or a Varshesha chosen among five candidates.

What the modern book in the library says

Advanced Predictive Astrology names Varsha Pala once, in a list of dasa systems alongside Ashtottari, Kala Chakra and Jaimini, while saying Vimshottari is the most popular. It does not describe how Varsha Pala works. So the reader of this page should hold the calculator's Tajika rules - return chart, Muntha, candidates - as what the code implements and documents, not as something this app has checked against a Tajika text. The sources page lists the library as a whole, and the methodology page describes the astronomy underneath.

One person, twelve annual charts

To see how the output behaves across years, take an invented person, Anaya, born on 21 March 1990 at 10:15 IST in Pune (18.5204 N, 73.8567 E). The engine gives her a Taurus ascendant at 9.17 degrees and a natal sidereal Sun at 336.5969 degrees, which is 6.60 degrees into Pisces. Her annual chart for each year from 2020 to 2031 was cast with the same buildVarshaphal call the calculator makes. Times below are converted to IST for reading; the engine itself reports UTC.

Three things stand out in this table, and each one follows directly from the code rather than from any interpretation.

The Muntha sign walks; the Muntha house does not

The Muntha sign moves exactly one sign per year, with no exceptions: Scorpio at 30, Sagittarius at 31, Capricorn at 32, and so on, because computeMuntha simply adds the age to the natal ascendant's sign index and wraps at twelve. Taurus plus 30 signs is Scorpio (30 is two full rounds plus six). At 36 - three full rounds - the Muntha is back in Taurus, Anaya's own natal ascendant sign.

The Muntha house, though, jumps around: 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 12, 11, 9, 7, 4, 2, 12. That is because the house is counted from the annual ascendant, and the annual ascendant is a fresh rising sign each year. Over 2020-2023 the annual ascendant moved forward three signs a year (Capricorn, Aries, Cancer, Libra) while the Muntha moved forward one, so the house fell by two each year. The pattern then breaks at 2024 and again at 2029, when the return instant slides back across the clock and the rising sign falls back with it.

The return instant drifts round the clock

Read the return times down the column: 03:04, 09:13, 15:21, 21:29, then back to 03:36, and on. Each year the return comes roughly six hours and eight minutes later on the clock than the year before, and after three such steps the date falls back by a day while the clock resets. The calendar date stays on or near 21 March throughout. This is the ordinary arithmetic of a solar year that is about a quarter of a day longer than 365 days, measured against a calendar with a leap day every fourth year.

The drift is not perfectly periodic. Compare the four-yearly matches: 09:13 in 2021, 09:43 in 2025, 10:13 in 2029 - the return is reaching each fourth year about half an hour later. Since a sidereal ascendant moves through roughly one sign every two hours on average, a half-hour drift per four years is enough to change the annual rising sign in a few cycles. In 2029, at age 39, the return fell at 10:13 IST, two minutes before Anaya's birth time of day, and the annual chart rose in Taurus at 8.93 degrees - within a quarter of a degree of her natal ascendant. That near-repeat is a coincidence of the calendar, not a rule the engine applies.

The Muntha cycle in one table

The Muntha sign depends only on the natal ascendant sign and the age. It repeats every twelve years, so for any natal ascendant you can write the whole cycle down once. For Anaya's Taurus ascendant:

Two consequences follow. First, the "Lord of the Muntha sign" candidate is fully predictable years ahead: you can read it off this table without casting anything. Second, the Muntha's house cannot be predicted the same way, because it needs the annual ascendant, and that needs the exact return instant at your birth place. If you only know your Sun sign or your Moon sign, you do not have what the Muntha needs: it starts from the ascendant, which is why the calculator asks for a birth time and refuses without one.

The age the engine uses is the chosen year minus the birth year. For the year a person is born, that is zero, and the engine produces a chart. For Anaya, the 1990 return was found at 04:44:59.506 UTC on 21 March 1990 - half a second before the birth instant itself, inside the one-second bracket the search stops at - with the annual ascendant at Taurus 9.17, identical to her natal one, and the Muntha in Taurus in the 1st house. A request for 1989 is refused with the engine's own sentence: a Varshaphal is cast for a year from the birth year onward. Through the calculator, a year more than 120 years after the birth is refused as well.

Reading the house category beside the Muntha

The calculator labels the Muntha's house and every candidate's house with a single category. That label comes from houseCategory in the shared Kundali engine, and it has a detail worth knowing: the five groups overlap, and the function returns the first group that matches, in a fixed order.

So the 1st house is labelled Kendra, never Trikona; the 5th and 9th are Trikona, never Panapara or Apoklima; the 8th is Dusthana, never Panapara; and only the 3rd house is ever labelled Apoklima. If you see "Apoklima" in the output, the planet or the Muntha is in the 3rd. The house meanings themselves are the subject of the twelve bhava pages, from the 1st house (Tanu Bhava) through the 7th (Yuvati Bhava) and the 11th (Labha Bhava) to the 12th (Vyaya Bhava). The calculator does not attach any interpretation to the Muntha's house beyond its number, its category and a one-sentence explanation of how it was counted.

In Anaya's twelve years the Muntha fell in a Kendra three times (2022, 2028, 2029), a Trikona three times (2021, 2023, 2027), Panapara three times (2020, 2026, 2030), Dusthana twice (2025 and 2031, both the 12th) and Apoklima once (2024). That spread belongs to her chart and these years; another person's cycle will differ.

The dignity labels the candidates carry

Each resolved candidate is printed with its sign and house in the annual chart and one dignity label. That label comes from dignityOf, the same function the Kundali uses for every graha, applied to the planet's position in the annual chart. It walks a ladder and stops at the first rung that fits:

1. 1.Exalted - the planet is in its exaltation sign (for Mercury, only in the first 15 degrees of Virgo).
2. 2.Moolatrikona - the planet is inside its Moolatrikona band of degrees.
3. 3.Debilitated - the planet is in its debilitation sign.
4. 4.Own sign - the planet is in a sign it rules.
5. 5.Friendly sign or Enemy sign - decided by the fivefold relationship between the planet and the sign's lord, combining the natural friendship table with the temporary relationship read from the annual chart's own placements.
6. 6.Neutral - everything else, including a natural friend that is a temporary enemy in this chart, or the reverse.

Because the temporary relationship is read from the annual chart, the same planet in the same sign can be "Friendly sign" one year and "Neutral" another. Anaya's Venus, the lord of her natal ascendant, shows this. It was in Aries in five of the annual charts run for this page: labelled "Friendly sign" in 1991, 2023 and 2028, and "Enemy sign" in 2020 and 2031. The planet and sign are the same; the rest of the sky is not.

A short sample of what the candidates looked like in Anaya's runs shows the full range of labels. The Navamsa and other vargas are not consulted here - the label is from the annual rashi chart alone.

Notice Saturn in 2022 and 2023. In 2022 Saturn is in Capricorn and labelled Own sign; in 2023 it has moved into Aquarius and is labelled Moolatrikona. Aquarius is also a sign Saturn owns, but the ladder checks Moolatrikona first, so a Saturn inside its Moolatrikona band in Aquarius is reported as Moolatrikona, not Own sign.

When one planet fills several roles

The FAQ above explains that a planet can be listed twice. In Anaya's runs it happens far more than twice, and some years show how few distinct planets the four roles can collapse into.

• 1990 (age 0): Venus fills three roles - Muntha lord, annual ascendant lord and natal ascendant lord - because in the birth year the Muntha sign, the annual ascendant and the natal ascendant are all Taurus. Only the weekday role (Wednesday, Mercury) is different.
• 2025: the Muntha is in Aries, so Mars is the Muntha lord, in Gemini in the 2nd. The other three roles are all Venus - lord of the annual ascendant (Taurus), of the natal ascendant (Taurus) and of the weekday (a Friday) - exalted in Pisces in the 11th.
• 2031: Venus fills three roles again - Muntha lord (Libra), natal ascendant lord, and weekday lord (a Friday) - all in Aries in the 6th, labelled Enemy sign. The fourth role, the annual ascendant lord, is Mars, because the chart rises in Scorpio at 0.18 degrees.
• 2022: the Moon fills two roles (annual ascendant Cancer, and a Monday return), both in Libra in the 4th.

The engine keeps every role as its own row even when the planet repeats. That is deliberate in the code: the roles are the evidence, and merging them would hide that, for example, three of the four roads in 2031 lead to the same Venus. Note also how fine the line can be. The 2031 annual ascendant is Scorpio at 0.18 degrees - less than a degree past the Libra cusp. Had the return come a minute or so earlier, the chart would rise in Libra and the annual-ascendant role would also be Venus.

How much a few minutes of birth time move the chart

A recorded birth time is often rounded. To see what that does here, Anaya's birth time was shifted by small amounts and her 2026 chart recast with nothing else changed. Moving the birth instant moves the natal Sun slightly (about 0.0007 degrees for every minute), and so it moves the moment the Sun returns to that longitude by almost exactly the same number of minutes.

Within four minutes either way, nothing printed changes except degrees: the annual chart still rises in Cancer and the Muntha is still in the 11th. At +17 minutes the annual ascendant crosses into Leo, and every house count shifts by one: the Muntha moves from the 11th to the 10th, a Panapara house becomes a Kendra, and all four candidates' houses drop by one - Venus, the Muntha and natal-ascendant lord, goes from the 9th to the 8th. The candidate list also changes, because the lord of the annual ascendant is now the Sun instead of the Moon.

At -60 minutes something different happens: the natal ascendant itself falls back into Aries, so the Muntha now starts from Aries and lands in Aries at age 36. The Muntha lord becomes Mars and the natal-ascendant lord becomes Mars too. In other words, there are two separate sensitivities - one in the annual ascendant, which can flip with a quarter-hour error when the annual chart rises near a cusp, and one in the natal ascendant, which can change the whole Muntha cycle.

How close to a cusp your own annual ascendant sits is printed in the calculator's output as its degree. Anaya's 26.32 degrees of Cancer was 3.68 degrees from Leo, which at this latitude and season was crossed in about seventeen minutes. Her 2025 chart, rising at Taurus 0.94, or 2031 at Scorpio 0.18, would be far more fragile. The article on unknown birth times covers the same problem across the rest of the app.

A December birthday and the chart that is still running

The calculator's default year is not the calendar year. It is the year whose return has most recently passed, worked out by activeVarshaphalYear: the engine finds this calendar year's return and, if that instant is still in the future, steps back one year. A second invented person shows why this matters.

Rohan was born on 18 December 1985 at 19:40 IST in New Delhi (28.6139 N, 77.2090 E). The engine gives him a Cancer ascendant and a sidereal Sun at 242.9517 degrees, in Sagittarius. Asked on 9 October 2026, activeVarshaphalYear returns 2025, not 2026. Asked on 31 December 2026, it returns 2026. His 2026 return does not happen until 19 December 2026 at 07:52 IST, so through October and November the chart he is living under is the one that began in December 2025.

Had the calculator defaulted to the calendar year, Rohan reading in October 2026 would have been shown a chart that has not begun - Sagittarius rising, Muntha in the 1st - instead of the Virgo-rising chart actually in force. The controller comment records that this was once the behaviour and was changed for exactly this reason. You can still ask for any specific year, from the birth year up to 120 years after it; the default only decides what you see when you do not.

The weekday candidate and Indian clock time

The third limit printed above says the weekday is read from the return instant's UTC date. Rohan's 2025 row shows it happening. His return fell at 20:15 UTC on Thursday 18 December, which is 01:45 IST on Friday 19 December. The engine takes the UTC day, Thursday, and lists Jupiter as "Lord of the weekday the year begins". Read by the Indian calendar date, the weekday would be Friday and the planet Venus.

Anaya's runs hit the same window three times in twelve years:

With the return drifting about six hours a year, roughly one year in four will land in that five-and-a-half-hour window for someone in India, as it did for Anaya. Note that the weekday is a calendar matter here, from midnight to midnight; the app's Panchang and Hora calculator handle the sunrise-based day separately, and the Varshaphal engine does not consult either. If the weekday candidate matters to your reading, check the IST date of the return yourself.

How long the annual chart is said to last

The engine marks each chart valid for 365.2425 days from its return. That figure is the length of the Gregorian calendar year. The next return, though, is a sidereal return - the Sun coming back to the same point against the stars - and Anaya's runs show the two do not quite agree. Her 2026 chart is marked valid until 21 March 2027 at 16:09:38 UTC; her 2027 return, computed by the same engine, falls at 16:27:42 UTC, about eighteen minutes later. Her 2027 chart's validity ends at 22:16:54 UTC on 20 March 2028; the 2028 return is at 22:35:30 UTC, eighteen and a half minutes later.

For a twelve-month reading, eighteen minutes is negligible. But if you want the exact handover between two annual charts, cast the next year and use its return instant, not the previous chart's validUntil.

Annual chart, dasha and transit side by side

Varshaphal is one of three timing lenses in this app, and they answer different questions. The Vimshottari Dasha calculator says which graha's period you are in, measured in years and sub-periods from the Moon's nakshatra at birth - the article on what a Mahadasha is explains it. Gochar reads where the grahas are right now, from your natal Moon. Varshaphal casts a new chart once a year and reads it for the twelve months that follow.

The Timing feature brings the dasha and transit views together, and the Kundali's Timeline tab shows the Varshaphal for the year being lived beside the running dasha. Numerology has its own annual cycle, the Personal Year number, which runs on a calendar-date rule rather than a solar return; the two do not change on the same day, and the article on when astrology and numerology disagree discusses what to do when they point different ways.

What is not computed, listed in one place

The engine is explicit about its own gaps, and it is useful to have them together:

• The Varshesha itself. The five candidates are listed; none is chosen. Classically the choice is made by Panchavargiya Bala, a five-part strength score (Kshetra, Uccha, Hadda, Drekkana, Navamsa). The engine header says it would rather publish no year lord than one built from four sub-strengths and a guess at the fifth.
• The Trirashi lord. The fifth candidate is always printed as unresolved. Its table is indexed by sign and by whether the chart is a day or a night chart; the chart now knows which half it is, but the table is not built.
• Hadda (terms). The engine comment notes these boundaries have never been needed elsewhere in the codebase. BPHS Ch. 6 (Sl. 27-28) gives a different five-part division of each sign, the Trimshamsa, ruled by Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus over 5, 5, 8, 7 and 5 degrees in odd signs and reversed in even ones; that is the D30 the Trimshamsa calculator computes, and it is not used as a substitute for Hadda here.
• The place of residence. The chart is cast for the birth coordinates only, because only the birth place is stored. Classical practice is split on this, and a residence field does not exist yet.
• Tajika aspects, Sahams and month-by-month progressions. None of these is implemented, and the calculator does not imply otherwise.
• Interpretation of the Muntha's house. The output gives the number, the category and how it was counted; it does not attach a reading.

If you want a sense of the vargas that Panchavargiya Bala would draw on, the app's Drekkana (D3), Navamsa (D9) and Trimshamsa (D30) calculators each compute one division of a sign for the birth chart. None of them is fed into the Varshaphal, and none should be read as a step towards picking the year lord.

Why does my Muntha house change by different amounts each year?

The Muntha sign always moves one sign a year, but its house is counted from the annual ascendant, which is a new rising sign every year. In Anaya's example the annual ascendant moved about three signs a year for several years, so the Muntha house fell by two each time, then jumped when the return time slid back across the clock.

Is the return always on my birthday?

It is always close. Anaya's twelve returns from 2020 to 2031 all fell on 20 or 21 March UTC (21 March IST) for a 21 March birth. Rohan's, for an 18 December birth, fell on 18 and 19 December UTC. The time of day moves by roughly six hours a year.

Can I see the chart for a past or future year?

Yes. Pass a specific year and the engine casts that year's return. The calculator accepts any whole year from your birth year to 120 years after it, and refuses anything outside that range rather than guessing.

What happens in the year I was born?

The age is zero, the Muntha sits in the natal ascendant sign, and the return is effectively the birth instant. For Anaya, the 1990 return was found half a second before the birth time, with the same Taurus 9.17 ascendant as her birth chart.

My birth time is rounded to the nearest quarter hour. Should I trust the annual ascendant?

Look at its degree. In Anaya's 2026 chart, at Cancer 26.32, a shift of up to fifteen minutes left the ascendant in Cancer; seventeen minutes later it was in Leo and every house moved by one. An annual ascendant within a degree or two of a cusp deserves caution with a rounded birth time.

Why is the Trirashi candidate always blank?

Its table depends on the sign and on whether the chart is a day or a night chart, and that table is not built in the app. The engine lists the role so you know it exists, and marks it unresolved rather than filling it with a guess.

Does the calculator tell me whether the year will be good or bad?

No. It gives the return instant, the annual chart, the Muntha with its house and category, and four candidates with their sign, house and dignity label. It does not score the year, rank the candidates or interpret the Muntha's house.

If I move to another city, does my annual chart change?

Not in this app, because only your birth place is stored and the chart is always cast there. Classical practice is divided between birth place and place of residence; a chart cast for a different city would have a different ascendant and houses at the same instant.

Do the classical texts in this app's library describe Varshaphal?

No Tajika text is in the library. BPHS Ch. 27 and Saravali Ch. 5 and 7 discuss a year lord based on the weekday and the calendar, and Advanced Predictive Astrology names Varsha Pala once without describing it. The calculator's rules are documented in the engine code, not checked against a Tajika source.