What a Kundli actually is
A Kundli, or Janam Kundli, is a map of the sky at the moment you were born, drawn from a specific point on Earth. It records where the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn stood along the zodiac, along with the lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu, and it fixes the ascendant - the lagna - which is the degree of the zodiac rising on the eastern horizon at your birth moment.
Vedic astrology reads that map through houses (bhavas), signs (rashis), and lunar mansions (nakshatras). The tradition treats the chart as a framework for reflection rather than a fixed script. Two people with similar charts live very different lives, and classical texts are explicit that a chart describes tendencies and timing, not outcomes.
- Lagna (ascendant) - the rising sign and degree, which anchors the house structure
- Chandra rashi and nakshatra - your Moon sign and birth star, the basis of most Vedic timing
- Graha positions - each planet by sign, degree, house, nakshatra, and retrograde status
- Bhavas - the twelve houses and the themes traditionally assigned to each
Why birth time and place matter so much
The lagna moves roughly one degree every four minutes. A twenty-minute error can shift your ascendant into the neighbouring sign, which rearranges every house in the chart. The Moon travels about thirteen degrees a day, so an inaccurate time can also change your nakshatra and, with it, your entire Vimshottari Dasha sequence.
Place matters because the same instant produces a different rising sign in Kochi than in Chandigarh. Dasha geocodes your birth city and applies the correct historical time zone offset, so charts for births in India before and after standardisation are handled consistently.
- Use the time recorded on a hospital record or birth certificate where possible
- If your family remembers only an approximate time, note that and treat fine-grained house readings with caution
- Enter the town of birth, not the current city of residence
North Indian and South Indian chart styles
Dasha draws your Kundli in both the North Indian (diamond) and South Indian (square) formats. They contain identical information and differ only in convention. In the North Indian style the houses are fixed and the signs rotate; in the South Indian style the signs are fixed and the ascendant is marked.
Alongside the D-1 birth chart you get the D-9 Navamsa, the divisional chart traditionally consulted for marriage, dharma, and the maturing strength of each planet. Many astrologers read D-1 and D-9 together before saying anything about a placement.
What Dasha includes in a free Kundli
The core chart is free. You can generate it, read it on screen, and come back to it later without paying anything.
- Full planetary table with signs, degrees, nakshatras, and pada
- North Indian and South Indian chart rendering, plus the Navamsa
- Yogas identified from classical combinations, with the placements that formed them
- Vimshottari and Yogini Dasha timelines from your Moon nakshatra
- House-by-house Deep Dive readings and a downloadable PDF report
- Dasha AI, an assistant that answers questions using your actual chart and shows which placements it used
How to read your chart without getting lost
Start with three things: the lagna, the Moon, and the currently running Mahadasha. Those set the tone, the emotional register, and the season of life you are in. Everything else is detail that can wait.
Then look at where the lord of your lagna sits. A chart is a network, not a checklist, and a single placement rarely means much on its own. If you want a guided path through it, the Deep Dive walks house by house in plain language, and Dasha AI will explain any placement while citing the chart data behind its answer.
Nakshatras, the 27-fold division
Alongside the twelve signs, Vedic astrology divides the zodiac into 27 nakshatras of 13 degrees 20 minutes each, and subdivides every nakshatra into four padas. After the lagna, the nakshatra of the Moon is the most consequential detail in a Kundli, because it determines your Dasha sequence and feeds into almost every traditional matching and timing calculation.
Nakshatras predate the sign-based system in Indian astronomy and still carry substantial interpretive weight. Each has a ruling planet, a symbol, and a body of traditional associations. In many families the birth nakshatra also decides the syllable used for a child's formal name, which is why people across India often know their birth star even when they have no idea what their rising sign is.
- Your Moon's nakshatra, its pada, and its ruling planet
- The nakshatra occupied by every other planet in the chart
- The lagna nakshatra, used for finer readings of the ascendant