Ganda is the tenth nityayoga, and its name means a knot, a danger, or an obstacle. It is one of the inauspicious yogas, regarded in the panchanga as unfavourable for beginning important undertakings. Reckoned like the others from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it takes its place as the lights separate through the lunar month. The malefic yogas such as Ganda are avoided when an astrologer selects an auspicious moment, the tradition treating them as periods of entanglement and hindrance. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which assigns each of the twenty-seven yogas a settled favourable or unfavourable nature; the underlying reality is the combined motion of Sun and Moon.
The word ganda, a knot, has a documented secondary use in traditional Indian numerology and naming practice: children born under certain especially inauspicious combinations of tithi, nakshatra, and yoga, this one among them, are traditionally described as born in ganda mool or a related inauspicious condition, and some regional customs prescribe a specific pacifying ritual, a shanti rite, performed shortly after birth to counteract the association before the child is formally named. This is a separate, birth-specific application of the same inauspicious classification described in general terms above, applied to the individual nativity rather than to the choice of a muhurta for an undertaking.