Gara

Gara is the fifth karana and the fifth of the seven movable (chara) karanas. It recurs eight times across the lunar month, half a tithi at a time. The almanac tradition reads the movable karanas as generally favourable, and Gara is associated with agriculture, cultivation, and steady growth, fitting undertakings tied to the earth. Within the panchanga the karana subdivides the tithi and so sharpens the reckoning of auspicious moments. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition. The distinction between the seven recurring karanas and the four fixed ones reflects the arithmetic of the month: seven names rotating through most of the fifty-six variable half-tithis, with the four fixed karanas filling the positions around the new moon where the rotation would not divide evenly.

Modern panchanga software and printed almanacs frequently render this karana's name as Garaja rather than Gara, and both forms are current in different regional and print traditions without either being simply an error; the underlying Sanskrit is the same karana in the fixed sequence of eleven, and a reader comparing two almanacs that give different spellings for the fifth karana is not looking at a genuine disagreement about the calendar, only a difference in transliteration convention. The agricultural association given to Gara in the almanac tradition places it, along with Vanija's mercantile reading, among the karanas whose traditional character reflects an ordinary working economy, ploughing and trade, rather than the ritual or ancestral concerns attached to the karanas of the dark of the Moon.

Gara is fifth in the rotation of movable karanas and holds positions 6, 13, 20, 27, 34, 41, 48 and 55 of the sixty.

Position p occupies the tithi numbered ceiling of p over two, in its first half when p is odd and its second when p is even. So Gara takes the second half of tithi 3, the first of 7, the second of 10, the first of 14, the second of 17, the first of 21, the second of 24 and the first of 28. That is four tithis in the bright fortnight and four in the dark.

One of those positions has a particular character. Position 27 is the first half of tithi 14, Shukla Chaturdashi, the last full tithi before the full moon, and position 55 is the first half of tithi 28, its counterpart in the waning half. Gara therefore stands immediately before the two most watched points in the month without ever occupying either of them.

On duration, the figure to hold is 11 hours and 49 minutes as an average, being one sixtieth of a synodic month of 29.530589 days. The real span depends on how fast the Moon is pulling away from the Sun, which varies with both bodies' distance from the Earth, and runs from about ten hours to about thirteen and a half. Two consecutive karanas in the same month can differ by more than two hours in length.