Why shraddha is not the date of death

The annual shraddha — thivasam — is kept on the day the tithi of the death runs again, in the paksha and the lunar month the death fell in. It is not kept on the Gregorian anniversary.

A tithi is a lunar day: one thirtieth of the cycle from new moon to new moon. Twelve lunar months are about 354 days, eleven days short of a solar year, so the same tithi in the same lunar month falls about eleven days earlier in the English calendar each year. About every third year a leap month is inserted and puts roughly a month back on.

The result is that the day walks back and forth across a band about four weeks wide. It is not drifting and it is not wrong; it is a different calendar, and the two only line up by coincidence.

Take a death on 12 June 2010 at Chennai. The tithi at sunrise that day was Amavasai, in the lunar month Vaishakha — Vaikasi in the Tamil reckoning. Asking this app for the next eighteen years gives:

2011 falls on 1 June, 2012 on 20 May, 2013 on 8 June, 2014 on 28 May, 2015 on 17 May, 2016 on 4 June, 2017 on 25 May, 2018 on 15 May, 2019 on 3 June, 2020 on 22 May, 2021 on 10 June, 2022 on 30 May, 2023 on 19 May, 2024 on 6 June, 2025 on 26 May, 2026 on 16 May, 2027 on 4 June and 2028 on 23 May.

Every date in that list is earlier than 12 June, by between 2 and 28 days. The pattern is plain: back about eleven days, back about eleven again, then forward about nineteen. That forward jump is the leap month arriving.

So a household that keeps the English date is out by up to four weeks, and is out by a different amount every year.

A tithi does not begin at midnight or at sunrise. It begins whenever the Moon reaches the right angular distance ahead of the Sun, which can be at any hour. A tithi lasts roughly a day, but only roughly: run this app’s own ephemeris across 2015 to 2025 and the shortest is a little over 20 hours and the longest a little under 27. So a tithi may cover two sunrises, or none.

Every lunar observance therefore has to say at which instant the tithi is to be read, and that instant is what settles the date. A festival is usually kept on the day whose sunrise the tithi holds — the udaya tithi, which is the rule an almanac prints festival dates by.

A shraddha is not read at sunrise. The rite belongs to the aparahna, the fourth of the five parts of daylight, from three fifths to four fifths of the way from sunrise to sunset. The tithi wanted is the one running then.

Most years the two rules name the same day and nobody needs to know the difference. They part when a tithi is long enough to hold two sunrises or short enough to hold none — which is exactly the year a family ends up telephoning the priest. In the eighteen years above, the two rules named different days in four of them.

This app computes both and prints both. It leads with the aparahna day, because that is the rule for a rite offered to the departed, and it names the sunrise day beside it whenever they differ rather than choosing silently. Where a tithi covers the whole aparahna on two consecutive days, the later day is taken, which is what Dharmasindhu prescribes and what most panchangams print.

About one year in thirty the lunar month of the death occurs twice: an adhika masa, the intercalary month, runs immediately before the nija masa — the real one, named by the Sun’s entry into a sign — and borrows its name.

That year has two candidate days, roughly a month apart, and the traditions differ over which is kept. Most of the South, and the Tamil country, keeps the rite in the nija month. Parts of Gujarat and Maharashtra keep it in the adhika month. Some families keep both.

The app leads with the nija day and prints the adhika day beside it whenever the year has one, saying which is which. It does not choose for you. A worked case: a death on Shravana Shukla Panchami falls on 21 August in 2023 by the nija month and on 23 July by the adhika, because 2023 had an adhika Shravana.

Two rarer cases are also named rather than smoothed over. A kshaya tithi begins after one sunrise and ends before the next, so no civil day holds it at sunrise at all; the common rule takes the day it is running on, and some families keep the day before. A vriddhi tithi holds two sunrises, so two days carry it. The app says when either has happened.

One case it does not handle is a kshaya masa, a lunar month swallowed whole, which happens two or three times a century. The app falls back to the month the year’s own sankranti names, which is what most almanacs do, and the case is too rare to guess a rule for.

The place where the rite is kept, which is not necessarily where the death happened. The day turns on that place’s sunrise and on the hour of its afternoon, so a family keeping the rite in Coimbatore for a death in Delhi should enter Coimbatore.

The hour of the death, if it is known. The tithi changes at no fixed time of day, so an hour has to be chosen. When the hour is not given, this app reads the tithi at sunrise of that date — the tithi the civil day itself carries, and the one a wall calendar prints against it. Noon would be a silent guess that lands on the next tithi about a third of the time.

That choice matters most for a death in the night. If the death was between sunset and the next sunrise, the tithi may have been the previous day’s, and a household that counts the day as running until sunrise would read that earlier tithi. Nothing can settle it from the date alone. The app says which instant it used, so the question can be put rather than assumed away.

Take them to whoever performs the rite for your family. The arithmetic here is exact and its reasoning is printed: the tithi, the lunar month, the rule each day was chosen by, and the alternative day whenever there is one. What it cannot know is which reading your household keeps, and that is a real question with more than one correct answer.

The dates can be sent to a calendar as all-day entries. Each entry carries the tithi and the month, the rule the day was chosen by, and — where the day is not settled — the other day and why. An entry that hid the disagreement would be worse than none.

The yearly thivasam by the tithi, not the English date.

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