Prahar
Three hours: an eighth of a day. Traditional South Asian watches of the day and night.
1 prahar = 10,800 seconds (exactly).
About the prahar
Hindi speakers still say dopahar for afternoon, literally two prahars, and Bengali has the related dui-pohor. The Sanskrit prahara divides the day and night into eight watches, four starting at sunrise and four at sunset. In the standard model each lasts about three hours, though traditionally the length followed the real sunrise and sunset, so day watches were longer in summer and night watches longer in winter.
A nineteenth-century note cited by Wikipedia puts northern India's day prahars at roughly 3.5 hours near the summer solstice and 2.5 hours in winter. The figure used here is the fixed three-hour watch. Four prahars correspond to fifteen muhurtas, but the two systems agree only at sunrise and sunset, since a muhurta is a fixed 48 minutes.
Prahars matter in Indian classical music, where each raga is prescribed for a particular watch. The link between raga and time is already in Narada's Sangita Makaranda, dated between the 7th and 11th centuries, and Wikipedia argues the idea is older than Bhatkhande, who died in 1936.
Sources: Wikipedia: Prahara; Wikipedia: Hindu units of time
Prahar conversion chart
1 prahar expressed in every other time unit:
| Unit | 1 prahar |
|---|---|
| Seconds | 10,800 |
| Minutes | 180 |
| Hours | 3 |
| Days | 0.125 |
| Weeks | 0.01785714286 |
| Months | 0.00410686051 |
| Years | 0.0003422383759 |
| Milliseconds | 10,800,000 |
| Microseconds | 10,800,000,000 |
| Nanoseconds | 10,800,000,000,000 |
| Decades | 0.00003422383759 |
| Centuries | 0.000003422383759 |
| Millennia | 3.422383759×10⁻⁷ |
| Picoseconds | 1.08×10¹⁶ |
| Common Years | 0.0003424657534 |
| Leap Years | 0.0003415300546 |
| Julian Years | 0.0003422313484 |
| Tropical Years | 0.0003422386663 |
| Sidereal Years | 0.0003422253865 |
| Synodic Months | 0.004232898835 |
| Sidereal Days | 0.1253422387 |
| Aeons | 3.422383759×10⁻¹³ |
| Shakes | 1,080,000,000,000 |
| Fortnights | 0.008928571429 |
| Score | 0.00001711191879 |
| Lustra | 0.00006844767517 |
| Olympiads | 0.00008555959397 |
| Indictions | 0.00002281589172 |
| Jubilees | 0.000006844767517 |
| Ghati | 7.5 |
| Muhurtas | 3.75 |
| Shichen | 1.5 |
| Moments | 120 |
| Ship's Watches | 0.75 |
| Kin (Maya) | 0.125 |
| Winals | 0.00625 |
| Tun (Maya) | 0.0003472222222 |
| Katuns | 0.00001736111111 |
| Baktuns | 8.680555556×10⁻⁷ |
More Indian subcontinent units
- ghati (time)
- muhurta (time)
- tola (weight & mass)
- seer (weight & mass)
- maund (weight & mass)
- guntha (area)
- cent (India) (area)
- marla (area)
- kanal (area)
- lakh (counting & quantity)
- crore (counting & quantity)
- arab (Indian) (counting & quantity)
- kharab (Indian) (counting & quantity)
Browse all time units.