Varshphal Calculator — Your Annual Horoscope for Any Year of Life

Muntha — the point that moves one house a year

The muntha is the simplest idea in the whole system and one of the most useful. It starts at your natal ascendant and moves forward one house every year of life. At one it is in the second house, at eleven back in the twelfth, at twelve in the first again — a twelve-year wheel that keeps turning as long as you live.

The house the muntha occupies sets the year's subject. In the tenth it is a year about work and standing; in the fourth about home, property and the mother; in the seventh about marriage and partnership; in the eighth about upheaval, delay and things that surface from underneath. The lord of that house — the munthesh — carries the year's fortune, and its condition in the annual chart matters more than almost anything else on the page.

A muntha in the sixth, eighth or twelfth is not a bad year by itself. It is a year that asks for consolidation rather than expansion — and read that way, it is often the year that makes the next one possible.

Tajika yogas — how this system reads a year

Here Tajika parts company with Parashari altogether. Instead of sign-based combinations it reads planetary aspects by exact degree, within an orb — the deeper of the two planets' own orbs, halved and added. Whether a contact is applying (the faster planet still closing on the slower) or separating decides whether the matter is coming or going.

• Ithasala — an applying aspect between the significators: the matter comes about. The single most important yoga in an annual chart, and the one a Tajika astrologer looks for first.
• Ishrafa — a separating aspect: the matter has passed, or slips away.
• Nakta and Yamaya — a third planet carries the light between two that do not aspect each other: help arrives through an intermediary.
• Kamboola — the Moon supports an ithasala and strengthens it.
• Manau, Gairi Kamboola, Radda — the obstructions: something intervenes, or a promise made is withdrawn.

Your Varshphal lists every yoga formed this year with the pairs behind it — which planets, at what angle, inside what orb, and whether the contact is closing or already past. That last column is what separates a year in which something happens from a year in which it nearly does.

Tripataki chakra and the strength of each planet

Before predicting from a planet, Tajika weighs it. The tripataki chakra gives each planet in the annual chart its hadda lord — the lord of the exact degree it occupies, a term borrowed straight from the older Persian tradition — along with the five strengths taken together.

The use is plain: a planet that comes out weak here gives little this year whatever it promises in the birth chart, and a year lord that comes out weak makes for a year of intentions rather than results. It is the check that keeps an annual reading honest.

How accurate is an online Varshphal?

The solar return is computed to the second here, from the Sun's exact natal longitude on the Swiss Ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa. That matters more than people realise: the annual ascendant changes every two hours, so a return calculated to the day rather than the minute gives the wrong year lagna and, with it, the wrong muntha house and the wrong adhikaris.

Two conventions worth knowing. The chart is cast for your place of residence at the time of the return, not necessarily your birthplace — a person who has moved gets a different annual ascendant, and Tajika accepts that. And the year runs from one solar return to the next, not from the calendar birthday; the calculator states both dates on the page so there is no confusion.