The other day I asked a friend where he would be during Jyeshtha? He looked at me uncomprehending, and finally expostulated: “I have no clue about what you are asking, nor what you are trying to get at.” Laughingly, I replied that I was merely speaking of Jyeshtha, a month in the Hindu calendar, which roughly corresponds to May-June.

I can say with some certainty that most educated Indians, at least in the cities, know nothing or very little about the Hindu calendar. What is it based upon, the lunar or the solar cycle? What is its antiquity? How accurate is it? And what are the months that constitute it? Most of us are completely attuned to the solar Gregorian calendar, although frankly, it is a much later entrant among the global systems of calculation of time. The British used it, and we, as colonial inheritors — at least among the urban educated — simply adopted it and forgot all about the calendar that was used by us since time immemorial.

Although there are variations across India, the dominant Indian calendar is the Panchanga, which was also the traditional calendar in much of South East........

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