What is a kundali (kundli) — the Vedic birth chart, and how to read it

A kundali (कुंडली) — also spelled kundli, and called a janma patrika or simply a teva (टेवा) in much of North India — is a map of where the planets stood at the exact moment and place you were born. It looks like a grid of boxes with numbers and glyphs. Here’s how to stop seeing boxes and start seeing the chart.

The skeleton: Lagna and the twelve houses

Everything hangs off the Lagna — your ascendant, the sign rising on the eastern horizon when you were born. That sign becomes your first house; the other eleven follow in order around the zodiac.

Each house governs a territory of life:

• 1st — self, body, temperament
• 4th — home, mother, foundations
• 7th — marriage, partnerships
• 10th — career, public standing

(The full twelve get their own post: the twelve houses, bhava by bhava.)

The numbers inside each house are sign numbers — 1 is Aries, 6 is Virgo, 12 is Pisces. The glyphs or abbreviations are the planets sitting in that house.

Two formats, one chart

• North Indian style — diamond houses; the ascendant is always the top-center diamond, signs move.
• South Indian style — fixed square grid; each box is always the same sign, and the ascendant box is marked.

Same information, different drawing convention. TevaPatra renders both.

What to look at first

1. Your Lagna sign — the frame everything hangs on.
2. Your Moon — its sign and nakshatra drive your dasha timeline and, in Jyotish, matter more than your Sun sign.
3. Which houses hold planets — an occupied house has a planet working there directly. But an empty house isn’t inactive: its lord still runs it from wherever it sits, and other planets aspect into it (drishti). Empty doesn’t mean silent — it just means the house is managed rather than inhabited.

The part apps skip

A chart isn’t a personality label — it’s the input to a timing system. Your Moon’s nakshatra at birth sets where your Vimshottari dasha sequence starts, which is what makes a kundali predictive rather than merely descriptive.

That’s the whole point of computing it properly — and why TevaPatra starts there. (The name is no accident — it’s literally this document.)