Enter your birth date, time and place above and this free Lal Kitab rin calculator checks your chart for the nine debt patterns of the table of debts in the Lal Kitab of 1952: pitri, matru, stree and swa rin, the relatives’ debt, the daughter’s or sister’s debt, and daiviya, ajanma and nirdayi rin. For each one you see the rule, the houses of your own planets, whether the pattern is found, the table’s own words for it, and, as a note, any condition a later account adds. Like the Lal Kitab tool in Nidarshana Vedh Pro, it gives the debts as themes to be mindful of, never as a curse.
How it works
The chart. Lal Kitab keeps the birth chart as it is cast from the ascendant and writes the fixed numbers 1 to 12 over its houses. So a planet’s Lal Kitab house is its house counted from the rising sign, one sign to a house. The positions are sidereal, with the Lahiri ayanamsa and the mean node, from the NASA JPL DE440 tables on this site. If you do not know the birth time, the houses are counted from the Moon’s sign instead, and the page says so.
The nine patterns. The 1952 table names, for each debt, the houses of one planet and the enemy planets that bring the debt when they stand in those houses. A debt is found when one of its enemy planets stands in one of its houses, and that alone gives the answer. For six of the debts a later account adds a second condition on one more planet; it is not in the table, so the result shows it as a note under the debt and does not use it for the answer:
| Debt | Houses of (1952 table) | Houses | Enemy planets there (1952 table) | A later account adds (note only) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Father’s and ancestors’ debt (pitri rin) | Jupiter | 2, 5, 9, 12 | Venus, Mercury or Rahu | Jupiter in the 3rd, 6th, 7th, 8th or 10th |
| Self and clan debt (swa rin; zati, own, in the table) | Sun | 5 | Venus or a malefic (named here Saturn, Rahu or Ketu, as later accounts name them) | Sun not in the 1st, 5th or 11th |
| Mother’s debt (matru rin) | Moon | 4 | Ketu | none |
| Spouse and women’s debt (stree rin) | Venus | 2, 7 | Sun, Rahu or Moon | Venus in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th or 11th |
| Relatives’ debt | Mars | 1, 8 | Mercury or Ketu | none |
| Daughter’s or sister’s debt | Mercury | 3, 6 | Moon | none |
| Debt of harshness (nirdayi rin; zalimana, cruel, in the table) | Saturn | 10, 11 | Sun, Moon or Mars | Saturn in the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th or 12th |
| Debt of the unborn (ajanma rin) | Rahu | 12 | Venus, Sun or Mars | Rahu not in the 3rd, 6th or 12th |
| Spiritual debt (daiviya rin; dargahi in the table) | Ketu | 6 | Moon or Mars | Ketu not in the 2nd, 6th or 9th |
The sources, honestly. The Lal Kitab is five Urdu books attributed to Pandit Roop Chand Joshi: Lal Kitab ke Farman (1939), Lal Kitab ke Arman (1940), Gutka (1941), Lal Kitab ke Farman, revised (1942), and Lal Kitab (1952). The table of debts is in the 1952 book. This page follows it as given on pages 125 to 127 of the page-wise Hindi transliteration by Nirmal Kumar Bhardwaj, which is one volunteer’s work; we have not seen the Urdu original, so a misreading there would carry over here. The table gives the planets and houses of each debt and nothing more, and every answer on this page comes from it. The second conditions are not in it: they come from later accounts of the Lal Kitab, and only one of the two accounts we compared gives them, so the result shows each as a note under its debt, says whether it would hold in your chart, and never lets it change the answer.
Reading the result
The headline gives how many of the nine patterns are found, and names them. The table below takes each debt in turn, the ones found first, with the rule, the houses of the planets it names in your chart, the answer, the table’s own words and any note. A pattern is found when one of its enemy planets stands in one of its houses, as the 1952 table gives it; a later account’s second condition is shown in the note and does not change the answer. Your Lal Kitab houses are listed at the end, with the sign and the planets in each.
Read a debt as a family theme of duty and care, as the tradition describes it: the father’s line, the mother, the spouse, oneself, relatives, a daughter or sister, the spiritual life, those not yet born, or harshness to others. Of 300 sample births we checked, 291 showed at least one of the nine patterns, so finding one is ordinary and says nothing against you.
Where traditions differ
Lal Kitab rules are copied and changed from book to book. This page takes the planets and houses of every debt from the 1952 table, and later accounts differ from it in places. For the father’s debt, one account also counts Ketu with Mercury, Venus and Rahu. For the mother’s debt, one account also gives a separate way to the debt, the Moon in any house but the 2nd or 4th; read that way, the debt would be found in 272 of the 300 sample births we checked. For the debt of harshness, later accounts give the 10th or 12th, where the table gives Saturn’s houses, the 10th and 11th. In each case this page follows the table, and the note under the debt in the result says what the later account gives. The second conditions come only from the later accounts; the table has none, so the page shows them as notes and does not use them for the answer. The one for the debt of harshness belongs to the account that gives the 10th or 12th. Some later accounts also put each planet in the house of the sign it stands in, with Aries as house 1, instead of counting from the ascendant; this page and the Pro tool count from the ascendant.
The Lal Kitab tool in Nidarshana Vedh Pro follows the same 1952 table: it checks the same nine debts with the same houses and enemy planets, and shows the later accounts’ second conditions as notes that do not change the answer. So for the same chart the two give the same answer for every debt.
The free kundli on this site also lists five debts (pitru, matru, bhratru, stri and manushya rin) as a general astrological reading, not as Lal Kitab rules, and reads them another way: from the planet tied to each debt joined by Rahu, Ketu or Saturn, or from malefics in set houses. So the two pages can give different answers for the same chart, even for a debt with the same name. This page follows the 1952 table described above and shows the later accounts’ conditions as notes.
What it does not do
It gives no remedies, no reading of each planet in its house, and no sleeping planets or permanent houses, and it predicts nothing. The Lal Kitab tool in Nidarshana Vedh Pro has the full chart, the sleeping planets and houses, short summaries of each planet in its house, gentle suggestions for each debt and the traditional upay as a labelled option. For a Vedic look at ancestral themes, see the Pitra dosha calculator.
Frequently asked questions
↳ What is rin in Lal Kitab?
Rin means debt. The 1952 Lal Kitab has a table of nine debts, each a set of enemy planets in the houses of one planet, in the fixed houses of the chart, and each tied to a person or a duty: the father's line, the mother, the spouse, oneself, relatives, a daughter or sister and others. This page checks all nine.
↳ Does a debt in my chart mean a curse?
No. A debt here is a pattern that the tradition links to a duty in the family. It is a theme to be mindful of, it predicts nothing, and in the sample births we checked most charts showed at least one.
↳ Which houses does Lal Kitab use?
The houses of the birth chart counted from the ascendant, one sign to a house, with the fixed numbers 1 to 12 written over them. So a planet's Lal Kitab house is its house from the rising sign, not the number of the sign it stands in.
↳ Are these rules from the 1952 Lal Kitab?
The planets and houses are: they follow the table of debts on pages 125 to 127 of Nirmal Kumar Bhardwaj's page-wise Hindi transliteration of the 1952 Lal Kitab. Every answer comes from that table. The second conditions that later accounts add to six of the debts are shown as notes under those debts and do not change the answer. We have not seen the Urdu original.
↳ What if I do not know my birth time?
Tick the box and the check still runs, with the houses counted from the Moon's sign at midday. That is a rough check. With the birth time, house 1 is the rising sign, as Lal Kitab counts it.
↳ Do you suggest remedies?
Not on this page. The Pro Lal Kitab tool gives three gentle suggestions for each debt found, for service, charity and behaviour, which are our own and not from the books, and keeps the traditional upay as a labelled option that is off to start with.
↳ Why does another source give me a different answer?
Because the rules differ between accounts. Another source may add Ketu to the father's debt, count the Moon for the mother's debt, give other houses for the debt of harshness, apply second conditions that this page shows only as notes, or read the planets by sign instead of from the ascendant. The free kundli on this site also reads five debts by rules of its own; the Pro Lal Kitab tool follows the same 1952 table as this page. This page names the rules it uses, takes every answer from the 1952 table and shows the later conditions as notes.