Namaz Times in Lucknow, India Today

The closest major city in India to its own clock

Indian Standard Time is drawn from the meridian at 82.5 degrees east, which crosses the country through eastern Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow sits at about 26.85 degrees north and 80.95 degrees east — a little over a degree and a half west of that line. At four minutes of solar time per degree, the sun reaches its highest point over the city roughly six minutes after the clock reads noon.

No other city on our India list is that close. Delhi is out by twenty-one minutes, Jaipur by twenty-seven, Pune by thirty-five, Ahmedabad by forty. Lucknow is the one place where the national clock and the local sun are almost the same thing, which makes this page a reasonable rough reference for the rest of the country: whatever the timetable says here is close to what the sun is genuinely doing.

It also means the shifts show up when you leave. A timetable taken from Lucknow to Delhi is fifteen minutes early; carried to Mumbai it is more than half an hour early; taken east to Kolkata it is around half an hour late. Those gaps hold every day of the year and owe nothing to the calculation method.

Where Asr falls, and why two listings differ

Asr is the one prayer in the table where two correctly calculated times can disagree, because the question is juristic rather than astronomical. Both positions start from the shadow an upright object casts at solar noon, which at this latitude is never nothing, and then differ on how far it must grow.

• The Hanafi position holds that Asr enters when the shadow has lengthened by twice the object's own height beyond the noon shadow.
• The Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali position sets it at one further height.

The Hanafi time is always the later of the two, commonly by forty minutes to an hour, and the gap widens through the winter. This page publishes the Hanafi threshold, which is what most of Lucknow's congregations and most Muslims in India follow. If your masjid works to the Shafi'i position, take Asr from there — it is a difference of school rather than a fault in either figure.

Sunni and Shia reckonings in the same city

Lucknow is unusual among Indian cities in having a large and long-settled Shia population alongside its Sunni majority, a legacy of the Awadh court, and the two follow different conventions at several points in the timetable. It is worth being explicit about which one this table represents.

The times here follow the Sunni convention used across the rest of our Indian pages. Ja'fari reckoning differs in two respects that a reader will notice. Maghrib is not taken at sunset itself but a little after it, once the redness has left the eastern sky. Fajr and Isha are calculated with shallower angles than the eighteen degrees used here. It is also common practice to combine Dhuhr with Asr and Maghrib with Isha, so an imambara or a Shia masjid may hold fewer congregations in a day than this five-line table implies. None of that makes either set of figures wrong. Take your times from the congregation you actually pray with.

The angles this page uses, and why an app may disagree

Fajr and Isha cannot be settled by shadow length, because there is no sun above the horizon to cast one. They depend on how far it has sunk below the horizon, and that depth is a scholarly convention. This page applies the University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi parameters — eighteen degrees at dawn and eighteen at nightfall — the standard in general use across India and the subcontinent. The India prayer times hub explains the choice.

Where a phone shows a Fajr several minutes from what the local masjid announces, check the method setting first, since a Gulf or Muslim World League default uses shallower angles. Then check the Asr school. Whatever survives both is usually iqama: the interval each congregation leaves between the adhan and standing for prayer, which is decided locally and is not part of the astronomy at all.

The north Indian swing, compared with the south

At nearly twenty-seven degrees north, Lucknow is far enough from the equator for the seasons to move the table noticeably. The difference between the longest and shortest day here runs to about three and a half hours across the year, against a little over an hour in Kochi. Fajr travels a long way between June and December, and Maghrib the same distance in the other direction.

All of that movement is the sun. India keeps one offset of five and a half hours in every month and has never operated daylight saving, so the table never jumps by an hour on a changeover weekend, and a printed monthly sheet holds good from the first day of the month to the last.

Ramzan, and the boundaries of the fast

Fajr closes sehri and Maghrib opens iftar. Sunrise appears in the table but marks neither boundary; it only closes the window in which Fajr can still be prayed. With an eighteen-degree dawn angle a substantial stretch of time separates the two, and treating sunrise as the end of the pre-dawn meal is a large error, not a marginal one.

Because Lucknow's seasonal range is wide, the length of the roza changes measurably between the first day of Ramzan and the last, more so than it would in the south. And because Isha is fixed by a twilight angle rather than by a set number of minutes after sunset, the spacing between iftar and taraweeh moves through the month too. The monthly Lucknow table shows both at once.

Friday in a city of seminaries

Jumu'ah stands in place of Dhuhr for those attending, and the call follows the Dhuhr entry above. Lucknow has been a centre of Islamic learning in north India for a long time — the scholarly tradition associated with Firangi Mahal, and later the Nadwatul Ulama — and institutions of that kind hold their own congregations to their own iqama schedules. Older mosques such as the Asafi Masjid fill well before the khutbah begins. The imam sets the start and the length; the table only tells you when the window opens. Anyone praying at home prays Dhuhr as normal.

Orientation, and the neighbouring tables

Resolve the direction of prayer with the Qibla direction tool from your own position rather than borrowing a figure quoted for another city. From India it runs broadly westward, but the precise line changes across the country and a compass indoors is easily deflected by steel and reinforced concrete. Ramzan and Eid dates are on the Hijri calendar. The nearest tables here are Delhi prayer times and Kolkata prayer times.