Priya Sharma

Priya's interest in calendars began during fieldwork for her master's degree, when she spent three months in rural Rajasthan documenting how farming communities used the Hindu panchang (almanac) alongside the Gregorian calendar to schedule everything from planting seasons to wedding dates. She watched a village elder consult a hand-printed panchang to determine the most auspicious muhurat for a well-digging ceremony — and realized that for billions of people, the question "what's today's date?" has no single answer. It depends on which calendar you're asking about.

That insight shaped her entire career. Her research fellowship focused on comparative calendar systems: how the Islamic Hijri calendar's purely lunar structure causes Ramadan to drift through the seasons over a 33-year cycle; how the Hebrew calendar uses a 19-year Metonic cycle to keep lunar months roughly aligned with solar seasons; how the Chinese agricultural calendar layers solar terms onto a lunisolar framework; and how the Gregorian calendar itself was a political project — pushed through by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, resisted by Protestant nations for over a century, and not adopted by some countries until the 1920s.

She is the author of Many Moons: How Cultures Count Time, a book that traces how different civilizations have answered the same fundamental question — "how do we divide the year?" — and arrived at wildly different answers. The book covers everything from the Babylonian invention of the seven-day week to the French Revolutionary calendar's failed attempt to decimalize time. It was shortlisted for a cultural studies award and has been translated into three languages.

Priya brings a perspective that most time-and-date resources miss entirely: the human side. Calendars aren't just mathematical systems — they encode religious beliefs, agricultural knowledge, political power, and cultural identity. A public holiday isn't just a day off work; it's a statement about what a society considers worth remembering. Her writing explores these layers without losing sight of the practical question most readers actually have: "when is it, and why?"