Balava

Balava is the second karana and the second of the seven movable (chara) karanas that rotate through the lunar month. Like the other moving karanas it recurs eight times across the month, half a tithi at a time. In the panchanga the movable karanas are generally read as favourable, and Balava in particular is associated in the almanac tradition with auspicious and benefic activity. As one of the five limbs of the daily panchanga, the karana refines the reading of a given half-day: an astrologer selecting a muhurta, an auspicious moment, weighs the karana together with the tithi, nakshatra, yoga, and weekday. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which the seven recurring karanas cycle continuously while four fixed karanas fall only at the dark of the Moon.

The name Balava is generally connected to the Sanskrit root bala, strength, and the almanac's reading of the karana as suited to undertakings requiring endurance and steady effort follows that etymology, though, as with much of the karana nomenclature, the connection is traditional rather than explained in any surviving source. Electional manuals in the muhurta tradition generally treat the seven movable karanas as differing from one another mainly in degree and in flavour rather than in kind, Bava, Balava and Kaulava all falling toward the favourable end of the scale, so that a client's choice of activity, rather than a sharp difference in the karanas' character, usually decides which of the early movable karanas an astrologer prefers for a given muhurta.

Balava is the second of the seven movable karanas, so within the rotation that occupies positions 2 to 57 of the lunation it takes 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, 38, 45 and 52.

A karana at position p sits in the tithi numbered ceiling of p over two, in its first half if p is odd and its second if p is even. Balava therefore holds the first half of tithi 2, the second of 5, the first of 9, the second of 12, the first of 16, the second of 19, the first of 23 and the second of 26.

That distribution is four in the bright fortnight, tithis 1 to 15, and four in the dark, tithis 16 to 30. It is the ordinary pattern for a movable karana; only Bava, which begins the rotation, breaks it with five and three.

One position is worth singling out. Position 31 is the first half of tithi 16, which is Krishna Pratipada, the first day of the waning fortnight. Balava is therefore the karana that opens the dark half of every lunar month, taking over immediately after the full moon tithi has run out.

In clock terms a karana averages 11 hours and 49 minutes, one sixtieth of a synodic month of 29.530589 days. The actual span varies with the Moon's speed and with the Sun's, from roughly ten hours when the elongation is opening fastest to roughly thirteen and a half when it is opening slowest, so the almanac publishes an ending time for each karana rather than a length.