Saka Calendar

The Saka era counts its years from 78 CE, and Indian tradition generally attributes its founding to a king remembered as Salivahana, though the historical figure behind the epoch is genuinely disputed rather than settled. Many historians connect the year instead to the accession of the Kushan emperor Kanishka, whose empire's coinage and inscriptions provide much of the era's earliest datable evidence, while others have argued for a link to the Western Kshatrapa dynasty's ruler Chashtana instead, and the atlas records this as an open disagreement among specialists rather than adopting any one attribution as settled fact.

Whatever its founder, the era became one of the major year counts of classical and medieval India, used alongside the older Vikram Samvat and several regional eras in Hindu religious and administrative dating, and it travelled outward from India with the broader transmission of Indian astronomical science, jyotisha, into Southeast Asia, where it became the basis for the traditional calendars of Java and Bali. The calendar built on the Saka era is lunisolar, following the same general Hindu calendrical framework as the Panchanga, with intercalary months inserted to keep its lunar count aligned with the solar year the era itself is reckoned against.

In India the Saka calendar was formally reformed and adopted in 1957 as the National Calendar of India, used by the Indian government alongside the Gregorian calendar for official purposes, so Saka dates still appear today on the Gazette of India and in All India Radio broadcasts even though the Gregorian calendar dominates ordinary civil life. This is a live administrative role rather than a ceremonial gesture, and it distinguishes the Saka calendar from purely religious reckonings that have no formal government standing at all.

In Bali, where the Saka era arrived centuries ago along with Hindu and Buddhist influence from India, the calendar built on it governs one of the island's two parallel ritual calendars, the other being the pawukon. The Balinese Saka new year opens with Nyepi, the Day of Silence, on which the entire island observes a twenty four hour halt to travel, work, entertainment and, traditionally, even cooking fires, a single day of enforced stillness meant to convince malevolent spirits that Bali is uninhabited. The calendar's reach, from a disputed ancient Indian epoch to a modern Indian government's official use and a Balinese island-wide fast, makes it one of the longest-lived and most widely adapted year counts to survive from the ancient world into daily use today.