Two reports, two birth certificates, two different answers

The situation is familiar to a particular kind of family. One side sends a Gun Milan report: a number out of 36, eight rows, a colour-coded verdict. The other side sends a jathagam porutham reading from a Tamil astrologer — ten named checks, no total, and a single line that stops the conversation. The birth details are identical on both sheets. The conclusions are not.

The reflex at that point is to decide which report is wrong. It is usually the wrong reflex, because in most of these cases neither is. The two systems are not two versions of one test. They are two different sets of tests, assembled in different places, that happen to be computed from the same starting point — the position of the Moon at each partner’s birth.

That shared starting point is what makes them look interchangeable. They are not. Of the ten checks in the Tamil system, four have no counterpart anywhere in the eight Ashtakoot kootas. Of the eight kootas, the heaviest one is not among the ten as they are usually listed. Those absences are not oversights on either side. They are the reason a couple can clear one system and be flagged by the other.

This guide maps the two against each other test by test. Not to rank them — there is no honest basis for ranking them — but so that when two reports disagree, you can say precisely which test caused it, and decide what that particular test is worth to your family.

What Dasa Porutham is, and whose tradition it belongs to

Dasa Porutham means, plainly, the ten agreements. Dasa is Sanskrit for ten. Porutham is Tamil for a fit, a match, a suitability — the same word a Tamil speaker would use for whether two things go together. The framework is the marriage-matching method carried in Tamil astrological practice and printed in Tamil panchangams, the annual almanacs families have consulted for generations.

Like Ashtakoot, it is computed from the janma nakshatra — the birth star, the lunar mansion the Moon occupied at the moment of birth. There are 27 of these around the zodiac, each a little over thirteen degrees wide, and the Moon crosses roughly one per day. Both partners’ stars, and in some of the tests their Moon signs, supply everything the ten checks need.

The individual tests are older and more widely distributed than the Tamil list that assembles them. Several of them — the rajju grouping, the obstructing-star pairs of vedha — are treated in the Sanskrit muhurta literature, the body of texts concerned with auspicious timing and the fitness of nakshatras for particular acts. What the Tamil tradition contributed was the selection, the ordering, and the practice of carrying them together as a set of ten in the almanac.

Neighbouring South Indian traditions are related but not identical. Kerala practice works with its own porutham list and adds a separate reckoning of the malefic planets in both charts. Telugu and Kannada practice draws on koota-based matching as well. Presenting any one of these as the South Indian method would be inaccurate — they are distinct lineages, and what a given family follows depends on that family’s tradition and its astrologer, not on a state boundary.

One structural feature separates Dasa Porutham from Gun Milan before any individual test is examined. There is no total. Ashtakoot compresses eight measurements into a single number out of 36, which is what makes questions like "is 24 good" answerable at all. The ten poruthams are not summed. Each is judged on its own — traditionally graded uttamam (excellent), madhyamam (acceptable) or adhamam (poor) — and the reading is of which ones cleared, not of how many. Calculators that hand you a porutham score out of ten have added the arithmetic themselves; it is a convenience, not part of the framework.

The ten poruthams, one by one

Here is each of the ten in practical terms: what it looks at, and what the tradition holds it speaks to. Read the descriptions of what each test examines as reliable. Treat the numeric thresholds as one published form among several, because on several of these the almanacs genuinely differ — a point this guide returns to in its own section rather than burying.

• Dina Porutham — day-to-day wellbeing and the general health of the union. Computed from the distance between the two birth stars around the wheel of 27, reduced by a division, with a set of results treated as favourable. It is the general-fitness check, and the one most often reported first.
• Gana Porutham — temperament. Every nakshatra belongs to one of three temperamental classes: Deva (gentle, principled), Manushya (practical, mixed) and Rakshasa (intense, self-directed). The check asks whether the two temperaments sit well together in ordinary life.
• Mahendra Porutham — the continuation of the family line, and the durability of the household. Computed from the count between the two stars, with a specific set of positions in that count treated as favourable. The published sets form a regular series rather than an arbitrary list, but sources differ on where the series starts and how far it runs.
• Stree Deergha Porutham — literally the long life of the woman. It asks whether the groom’s star sits far enough ahead of the bride’s around the wheel, and the tradition reads that distance as bearing on the bride’s wellbeing and security in the marriage. How far is far enough differs between treatments. It is the one porutham whose name states its subject outright.
• Yoni Porutham — instinctive and physical compatibility. Each nakshatra carries an animal symbol from a set of fourteen, and the check reads the relationship between the two animals, with certain pairs treated as naturally hostile. In the Tamil form the male or female polarity assigned to each animal is commonly read alongside the pairing.
• Rasi Porutham — the relationship between the two Moon signs, counted as a distance around the twelve signs. Certain distances are treated as difficult and the rest as acceptable.
• Rasi Adhipathi Porutham — the friendship between the planets that rule those two Moon signs. Two signs may sit at an awkward distance and still be governed by planets that get along, and this check is where that shows up.
• Vasya Porutham — mutual pull and influence. Are the two capable of moving each other, or does the relationship sit in a shape where neither has any hold on the other.
• Rajju Porutham — treated in its own section below, at length. The 27 stars are distributed across five groups named for parts of a body, and the check asks whether the two partners fall in the same group.
• Vedha Porutham — obstruction. A fixed list of star pairs is held to obstruct each other, and the check asks whether the two birth stars form one of those pairs. It is a lookup, not a calculation — and the published lists are not identical, which matters later.

How the counting works, and why it starts from the bride’s star

Several of the ten are computed the same way underneath, and once you see the mechanism the individual tests stop looking arbitrary.

The 27 nakshatras form a closed wheel. Counting between two stars means starting at one and walking forward to the other, counting inclusively — that is, counting the starting star as one. From Ashwini, the first star, to Rohini, the fourth, the count is 4 and not 3. If the target star sits behind the starting point, you continue around the wheel past the twenty-seventh and back to the first. So every pair of stars yields a number from 1 to 27.

That number is then interrogated in one of two ways. Some poruthams divide it — commonly by 9, since 27 is three complete cycles of nine — and read the remainder, treating some remainders as favourable and others as not. Others read the count position directly, treating a specific set of positions as favourable. Dina works on a remainder. Mahendra works on positions. Stree Deergha works on a threshold: whether the count is large enough.

The direction of that count is the part that matters most, and it is where Dasa Porutham differs structurally from Ashtakoot. In the commonly published forms of these poruthams the count runs from the bride’s star to the groom’s, not the other way. The bride’s star is the reference point from which the wheel is walked.

Compare what our own Ashtakoot engine does with Tara koota, which uses the identical arithmetic — a count between the two stars, reduced by nine. It scores the count in both directions: the bride’s star reckoned from the groom’s, and the groom’s from the bride’s, each worth half of the koota’s three points, each returning full marks or nothing. Two directions, two half-verdicts, added together. The porutham form takes one direction and returns one verdict.

That is not a small difference. A one-directional test and a two-directional test running the same arithmetic on the same two stars will agree on many pairs and disagree on some, entirely as a matter of construction. Neither is a miscalculation of the other. And it means that Stree Deergha, which explicitly asks about the bride, has no way to be reciprocated — there is no matching test asked in the groom’s direction. The asymmetry is deliberate and it is part of what the framework is.

Rajju Porutham, and why it has no counterpart in the North

Rajju is the porutham families ask about by name, and the one that most often produces the sentence that stops a conversation. It deserves to be understood properly rather than feared.

A rajju is a cord or a tie. The test arranges all 27 nakshatras across five groups, each named for a part of a body: pada (foot), kati (waist), udara (navel or belly), kanta (neck) and siro (head). Both partners’ birth stars fall somewhere in that arrangement. The test asks one question — do they fall in the same group.

The arrangement itself is not a random partition. The stars are laid out in a fold. Walk the wheel from the first star and the groups run foot, waist, navel, neck, head; then the line turns and comes back down, neck, navel, waist, foot; then it turns again and climbs. Two things follow from the shape. The head sits at the top of each climb, so it is touched once per traverse. The foot sits at the bottom, where each descent meets the next climb, so it takes two stars at every fold. Three climbs give the head three stars; the foot and the three bands between it and the head take six each. Six plus six plus six plus six plus three is 27 exactly. The uneven group is a consequence of the geometry, not an exception to it.

Working that fold out gives foot: Ashwini, Ashlesha, Magha, Jyeshtha, Mula, Revati. Waist: Bharani, Pushya, Purva Phalguni, Anuradha, Purva Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada. Navel: Krittika, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Vishakha, Uttara Ashadha, Purva Bhadrapada. Neck: Rohini, Ardra, Hasta, Swati, Shravana, Shatabhisha. Head: Mrigashira, Chitra, Dhanishta.

That is the arrangement carried in commonly published treatments, and it is worth being plain about its status here. The construction rule is stated above so you can walk it yourself and check the result. What varies between sources is the direction the fold is walked and the names given to the limbs — and walking it the other way would exchange foot and head throughout. Check the arrangement your astrologer or almanac uses rather than assuming this one. The group sizes are not in doubt: any arrangement built on this fold gives three stars to the band at the turning point and six to each of the others.

The reasoning behind the test is spatial, and it is worth stating in the tradition’s own logic rather than dismissing it. Two lives tied at the same point of a body are, in this image, bound at one place instead of supporting each other at different places. Two people falling in different rajjus are read as covering different ground. Two people in the same rajju are read as pressing on the same point. Each limb carries its own traditional area of concern, and published sources disagree about which limb maps to which concern — a disagreement worth knowing about, because a reader given one mapping as fact has been given more certainty than the sources support.

Some treatments add a refinement: the distinction between the ascending arm of the fold and the descending one. Two stars in the same limb but on opposite arms are treated by these sources as a lighter case than two on the same arm. Other treatments do not make the distinction at all. If a reading has flagged your rajju, this is a specific and worthwhile question to ask.

The reason Rajju matters for this guide is what it is not. There is no rajju in Ashtakoot. Not under another name, not folded into another koota, not approximated. None of the eight kootas reads the sequence of nakshatras as a body with limbs. Varna reads the Moon sign’s class; Vashya reads sign groupings; Tara counts distance; Yoni reads animal symbols; Graha Maitri reads sign lords; Gana reads temperament; Bhakoot reads sign distance; Nadi reads the three-fold constitutional class. Every one of those is a different question. A couple sharing a rajju is invisible to all eight.

And Rajju is not scored. In a framework where nothing is summed anyway, Rajju is stated as a condition rather than as one input among ten. That standing — a test that is not traded off against the others — is a structural fact about the Tamil system that a points total has no way to express.

Why two Tamil readings can disagree about the same couple

This is the section most guides skip, and skipping it is what leaves readers convinced that one of the two reports in front of them must be dishonest.

The counting rules for several poruthams differ between published sources and between panchangam traditions. Dina is read from a remainder after dividing by nine, and the set of remainders treated as favourable is not the same in every treatment. Mahendra is read from positions in the count, and while those positions form a regular series in the published forms, the starting point and the length of the series are not uniform across sources. Stree Deergha is read from a threshold, and the threshold varies. These are not typos propagating across the internet. They are genuine differences between lineages.

Vedha is the clearest case. The obstructing pairs are a fixed lookup list, and the published lists are not identical. So if two readings disagree about vedha, the disagreement is usually about which list is in use, not about the couple.

The enumeration itself varies too. Which ten count as the ten is stable across the treatments that carry ten, but longer lists exist — treatments carrying twenty poruthams, and lists that include a check corresponding to Nadi that the ten do not carry under that name. A reading that mentions a porutham you cannot find in the list above is not necessarily wrong; it may be working from a longer list.

Then there is the input, which can differ before any rule is applied. Tamil almanacs come in two computational lineages: vakya panchangams, which use older mean-motion tables, and thirukanitha panchangams, which use directly computed planetary positions. For a birth near a nakshatra boundary the two can place the Moon in neighbouring stars. So can two systems using different values for the ayanamsa, the offset between the sidereal and tropical zodiacs. Change the star and you have changed every one of the ten tests at once.

The practical consequence is a single question, and it is a better question than "which one is right." When two porutham readings differ, ask which rule set each is using, and which panchangam tradition placed the birth star. That is nearly always where the difference lives, and it is answerable. Presenting any one almanac’s numbers as the definitive rule would be the actual error here.

Where the two systems are testing the same thing

Now the comparison this guide exists for. Start with the overlap, because it is larger than most people expect and it establishes that these two frameworks share ancestry rather than merely resembling each other.

Six of the ten poruthams have a recognisable Ashtakoot counterpart. In several cases they are not merely analogous — they are the same test wearing a regional name.

• Gana Porutham and Gana koota (6 points) are the same classification. Deva, Manushya and Rakshasa, assigned to the same 27 stars, asking the same question about temperament. Our engine grades Gana on a scale rather than as pass or fail, which is a difference in output, not in what is measured.
• Yoni Porutham and Yoni koota (4 points) both work from the fourteen animal symbols and both treat certain animal pairs as hostile. Our engine scores Yoni from a fourteen-by-fourteen table returning zero to four points. The Tamil form commonly reads the male or female polarity of the animals alongside the pairing, so the two can weight the same pair differently.
• Rasi Porutham and Bhakoot koota (7 points) both read the distance between the two Moon signs and both treat particular distances as difficult. The distances flagged and the direction of counting are not identical across treatments.
• Rasi Adhipathi Porutham and Graha Maitri koota (5 points) both read the friendship between the planets ruling those two Moon signs. Our engine grades this on a six-rung scale, from mutual enemies at zero to the same lord or mutual friends at five.
• Vasya Porutham and Vashya koota (2 points) are the same word and the same idea: mutual influence, read from groupings of the Moon signs.
• Dina Porutham and Tara koota (3 points) are the closest of all underneath, both counting star distance and reducing by nine — but as the counting section showed, Tara scores both directions and Dina, in its commonly published form, scores one.

Why the same couple can pass one system and fail the other

Four poruthams have no counterpart in any of the eight kootas: Rajju, Vedha, Mahendra and Stree Deergha. Two kootas are not among the ten as they are usually enumerated: Nadi, carrying 8 of the 36 points, and Varna, carrying 1. Once those absences are on the table, the disagreements stop being mysterious and become predictable.

Take the first case. Two people share a nadi — the same one of the three constitutional classes into which the 27 stars are divided. In our Ashtakoot engine that is decisive arithmetic: Nadi is all or nothing, so the koota returns 0 instead of 8, and the highest total the couple can now reach is 28 out of 36. If Bhakoot also fails, the ceiling drops to 21, because the remaining six kootas total 21 points between them. Our engine does check the published cancellation rules first — the same nakshatra in different padas, or the same Moon sign with different nakshatras — and restores the full 8 where they apply. Where they do not, the match is flagged, and it is flagged on the heaviest single line in the system. Now run the same two people through the ten poruthams. There is no test under that name among the ten. They can clear all ten.

Take the reverse case. Two people fall in the same rajju. Every one of the eight kootas is blind to it, for the reason the rajju section gave: no koota reads the star sequence as a body. Their Ashtakoot report can come back above 30 out of 36 with no dosha flagged at all — a result any family would read as a strong match — while the Tamil reading has stopped at a test the North Indian system never ran.

Neither of those outcomes is a calculator error, and neither astrologer has been careless. Each system is reporting accurately on the tests it contains.

There is a second, subtler reason the two diverge, and it is structural rather than about any individual test. Ashtakoot aggregates. Ten of its 36 points can be lost across the lighter kootas without changing the headline verdict, because a strong showing elsewhere carries the total. Dasa Porutham does not aggregate. Nothing is summed, so nothing can be outvoted. A framework that adds and a framework that gates will disagree at the margins by construction, even if they contained exactly the same tests — which they do not.

Ashtakoot does contain gate-like tests internally, which is worth knowing. In our implementation three kootas are all-or-nothing rather than graded: Varna returns 1 or 0, Bhakoot returns 7 or 0, and Nadi returns 8 or 0. The other five — Vashya, Tara, Yoni, Graha Maitri and Gana — return partial credit. So 15 of the 36 points sit in two switches. The difference is that in Ashtakoot those switches sit inside an aggregate that can absorb them, and in Dasa Porutham the gates stand outside any aggregate at all.

A third difference: cancellation. The Ashtakoot tradition publishes parihar rules — named conditions under which a flagged dosha is treated as annulled — and our engine applies them, restoring Bhakoot’s 7 points when the two Moon-sign lords are the same planet or mutual friends, and restoring Nadi’s 8 under the pada and Moon-sign conditions above. Our Nadi and Bhakoot deep dive works through both. A porutham verdict is not routinely dissolved by an equivalent published table in the same way, though local pariharam practice exists and an astrologer may bring it to a particular case. So the same flag has different downstream mechanics in the two systems, quite apart from whether the flag was raised.

Put all of that together and the honest summary is this. Two systems, six shared tests, four tests only one of them runs, two tests only the other runs, one that adds and one that gates, and different mechanics for setting a flag aside. Given that description, a family should expect the two to disagree about some couples. The disagreement is the systems working, not failing.

A mixed North–South match: what to actually do

If one side of the family counts gunas and the other counts poruthams, the situation is not a conflict to be resolved before anything else can happen. It is two readings to be obtained and then read together. A short sequence keeps it from turning into an argument.

Run both, on the same birth data. Do not attempt to convert one result into the other, and be wary of any tool that offers to. There is no conversion. The charts are identical; the instruments differ. Get the Ashtakoot breakdown, get the porutham reading from someone who works in that tradition, and put them side by side.

Verify the birth star before anything else. Both systems rest almost entirely on the janma nakshatra, and the Moon changes star roughly once a day. A birth time off by a quarter of an hour can move a boundary birth into the neighbouring star and change every test in both systems at once. Use the birth certificate or hospital record rather than family memory, and if the exact time is genuinely unknown, say so out loud to everyone reading the charts — it makes every result provisional. Our guide on matching without a birth time covers what is and is not still possible in that case.

Read the failing test, not the failing label. "Porutham illai" and "dosha" are labels. What a family can actually discuss is a specific named test with a specific reason. If it is Rajju, ask which limb, and whether the astrologer distinguishes the ascending and descending arms of the fold. If it is Nadi, ask whether the published cancellations were checked. A named test invites a real answer; a label invites only agreement or refusal.

Decide in advance what would change your mind. Agreeing beforehand which findings would genuinely matter is far easier than negotiating it after a flag has appeared and someone has become attached to a position. It also protects against the temptation to keep running calculators until one of them agrees with you.

And here is the mistake worth naming, because it is the one this situation produces most naturally. Running both systems and requiring a couple to clear both is a stricter filter than either tradition applies to its own. A Tamil astrologer does not ask about Nadi koota. A North Indian pandit does not ask about Rajju. Stacking the two systems as consecutive vetoes creates a standard neither lineage has ever held anyone to. If both families want both readings, the useful conversation is which findings each side treats as decisive within its own tradition — not a merged checklist that has to be cleared twice.

What neither system measures

A guide arguing that two systems disagree owes the reader an account of what they both leave out, because on that they agree almost completely.

Both are Moon-based and star-based. Both take two points on a wheel and interrogate the relationship between them. That is a narrow window onto a birth chart. Neither one reads the seventh house, the house of partnership, in either chart. Neither reads the seventh lord, or Venus, or Jupiter. Neither reads the Navamsa, the divisional chart classical practice treats as specific to marriage. Neither has anything to say about where each partner stands in their dasha periods — and the same proposal genuinely reads differently when one partner is entering a settled period rather than a demanding one.

Neither system scores Mangal dosha, the Mars placement question, though both traditions handle it separately alongside the matching. In our own Ashtakoot report the Mars comparison is computed and reported next to the 36 points; it is deliberately not scored into them, because it is a different question. The Tamil tradition treats the equivalent question, Sevvai dosham, outside the ten in the same way. If you want that subject properly, our Mangal Dosha guide covers it on its own terms.

And then the larger category. Neither system measures whether two people can talk to each other honestly, whether their families can be in a room together, whether they want the same life, how each behaves when money is short or someone is ill, or whether either of them is entering the marriage freely. Those are the questions marriages are actually decided by, and no arrangement of nakshatras contains them. Matching is one input among several, offered to a family that then has to think — which is how the vivaha samskara has always sat inside a much larger set of obligations. A report that arrives as a verdict has already overstepped what either system was built to do.

Getting an accurate reading, and where our tools stop

Accuracy starts and ends with the birth details: the date, the time as precisely as you can establish it, and the place, for both partners. Every test in both systems is downstream of the Moon’s position, and the Moon moves quickly. Fifteen minutes can matter. This is the one part of the process entirely within your control, and it is worth more than any amount of calculator-shopping. If you have not generated a chart yet, start with your own birth chart.

Be clear about what Sanatani.ai computes. Our matchmaking tool produces an Ashtakoot report: all eight kootas with their individual scores out of 36, the dosha flags with the published cancellation conditions actually checked rather than skipped, and the Mangal dosha comparison reported alongside. It does not compute the ten poruthams. We would rather say that plainly than hand you a porutham verdict our engine did not calculate — and given how much the porutham rule sets differ between almanacs, a single automated answer would misrepresent the tradition even if we did.

For the porutham side, ask Jyothshi. Bring both birth stars and ask about a specific test — what your rajju grouping is and how the arrangement is derived, how the counting from the bride’s star works for Dina or Stree Deergha, why a particular vedha pairing appears in one list and not another. That is a conversation, which is the right shape for a subject where the sources genuinely differ, and it will leave you able to ask your family astrologer a sharper question than you could have before.

If Gun Milan itself is new territory, our 36-guna guide explains each of the eight kootas and what the totals mean number by number.

The takeaway to hold on to is the one this guide opened with. When a Tamil reading and a North Indian reading disagree about the same couple, do not ask which is right. Ask which test caused it. Find out whether that test exists in the other system at all — four of the ten do not, and the heaviest koota is not among the ten. Then decide, as a family, what that specific test is worth to you. That question has an answer. "Which system is correct" does not, and chasing it is how families lose good matches and accept bad ones for reasons nobody can name afterwards.