India's most famous voice, computed
The public record does the rest of the talking. He failed an All India Radio newsreader audition in the late 1960s. Roughly thirty years later, that same voice was the most recognisable sound in India. This page will not tell you the chart caused that. It will show you that the chart wrote the tension down, and let you decide what to do with it.
Everything above is computed from the birth date — 11 October 1942, Allahabad — using the Swiss Ephemeris and the Lahiri ayanamsa. Every one of those placements holds at every minute of that day, which is exactly why we are willing to print them.
Fifty-seven years, two collapses
A rejected radio voice, a superstar, a near-fatal accident, a bankruptcy, and then the biggest second act Indian television has produced.
That red line is the whole problem. His birth nakshatra decides which planet opens his Vimshottari dasha sequence — Chitra hands it to Mars, Swati hands it to Rahu. The two circulating birth times sit on opposite sides of it. So the eras below are dated from the public record, not from a dasha. We'd rather show you the gap than paper over it.
Almost named "Revolution"
- Born in Allahabad — now Prayagraj — to the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Teji Bachchan. His parents planned to call him Inquilab, "revolution", after the slogan Inquilab Zindabad. The poet Sumitranandan Pant suggested Amitabh instead.
- Boys' High School in Allahabad, then Sherwood College in Nainital, then a B.Sc. from Kirori Mal College in Delhi in 1962.
- Before any of the films: a business-executive job at Bird & Company, a shipping firm in Kolkata. And an audition to read the news for All India Radio, which he did not pass.
A voice-over, then a long run of films nobody watched
- His first screen credit was not a face at all — it was his voice, narrating Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969). The instrument arrived before the actor did.
- Acting debut the same year in Saat Hindustani. Then a stretch of films that largely came and went.
- The exception: Anand (1971), opposite Rajesh Khanna, which won him a Filmfare award for Best Supporting Actor and told the industry something it hadn't noticed yet.
The angry young man arrives, and doesn't leave for a decade
- Zanjeer (1973) is the hinge. A furious, near-silent police officer — the opposite of the singing romantic hero the industry was selling — and it worked.
- 1975 delivered Deewaar and Sholay in the same year. Between them they rewrote what a Hindi-film lead was allowed to be.
- He married Jaya Bhaduri in June 1973, weeks after Zanjeer's release.
A year lost, and one term as an MP
- On 26 July 1982, filming a fight scene for Coolie in Bangalore, he was involved in a near-fatal accident. He has spoken about it publicly many times since; the whole country kept vigil for weeks.
- He returned to work the following year. In December 1984 he was elected Member of Parliament for Allahabad, and resigned the seat in July 1987.
He built a studio. It took the house down with it.
- Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd was founded in 1996 as a full-service entertainment company — films, events, distribution, music.
- It collapsed financially and operationally in 1997. In April 1999 the Bombay High Court restrained him from selling his bungalow while loan-recovery proceedings brought by Canara Bank were pending.
- He was in his mid-fifties, out of fashion as a leading man, and publicly in debt. He has since described going to producers and asking for work.
He fixed it with the exact thing that once got him rejected
- Kaun Banega Crorepati launched in July 2000. What it sold was not his face — it was a man talking to strangers, one question at a time. The voice, at last, doing the whole job by itself.
- The films came back with it: Mohabbatein (2000), Black (2005), Paa (2009), Piku (2015) — three of which brought National Film Awards for Best Actor, after the first for Agneepath in 1990.
- Padma Shri in 1984, Padma Bhushan in 2001, Padma Vibhushan in 2015, and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award — India's highest film honour — for 2018, presented in December 2019.
- He turns 84 this October. Season 18 of the quiz show began airing on 10 August 2026.
Two things people actually search for
One is a genuine astrological problem. One is money. Both are public record, and neither gets a fake answer here.
Two versions circulate widely. Bachchan himself has said he was born between 3 and 4 in the morning; most Indian astrology sites use 3:30 a.m. His father's autobiography describes the birth as taking place in the early afternoon, and a large family of charts — including the reference chart in our own test suite — uses 4:00 p.m.
Astro-Databank rates his data DD: "dirty data", conflicting sources, no verified record. That rating is the honest one.
We ran his chart at ten-minute steps across the whole of 11 October 1942 and then narrowed to the second. The Moon leaves Chitra and enters Swati at 08:47 a.m.
3:30 a.m. is Chitra. 4:00 p.m. is Swati. Chitra's lord is Mars; Swati's is Rahu. Since the birth nakshatra is what sets the Vimshottari dasha order, the two times don't just shift dates — they produce two entirely different sequences.
A wrinkle almost nobody accounts for: India ran on Indian War Time, UTC+6:30, from September 1942 to October 1945. His birth day falls inside that window, so a clock time of 3:30 that morning is an hour further from GMT than the +5:30 nearly every site assumes. It doesn't change a single sign — it just adds one more reason not to trust the minute.
ABCL's collapse in 1997 left him personally exposed. By April 1999 the Bombay High Court had restrained him from selling his Mumbai bungalow while Canara Bank's loan-recovery cases were pending. He has described the period in his own words in interviews and on his blog for two decades since — including going back to producers to ask for work at 57.
This is his own telling, not an allegation by anyone. No wrongdoing was alleged or found; a company failed.
His Venus is debilitated — the money-and-comfort planet in the sign where classical texts give it the least support. That is a permanent feature of his chart, true on the day he was born and true on the day Sholay opened.
Which is precisely the point: a placement that never changes cannot explain an event that happened once. It describes a texture — earned late, rarely handed over. It does not date a bankruptcy, and we are not going to pretend it does.
Two things that had no business working
🎙️ → 📺 Rejected by radio, rescued by a microphone
- He failed an All India Radio newsreader audition in the late 1960s. The reason usually given in retellings is his voice.
- His very first screen credit, in 1969, was a voice-over — not a role.
- Thirty-one years later, a quiz show built almost entirely around him speaking to one nervous stranger at a time pulled him out of debt and made him a bigger household name than the films ever had.
🔭 The chart bit: Mercury exalted in its own sign, and combust. A planet at maximum dignity, standing too close to the Sun to be seen. If you were writing that as a story rather than a chart, you'd call it on the nose.
📉 → 🏆 Broke at 57, Dadasaheb Phalke at 77
- 1999: restrained by a court from selling his own house while a bank pursued recovery.
- 2005, 2009 and 2015: National Film Awards for Best Actor for Black, Paa and Piku — the last of them at 72, in a film where he played a constipated Bengali retiree.
- December 2019: the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest honour in cinema.
🔭 The chart bit: Jupiter exalted in Cancer — the growth-and-elder planet at its strongest — sitting on the opposite side of the chart from that crowded, burnt Virgo stack. Two very different engines in one horoscope.
Seven placements. Seven receipts.
Every position below is computed for 11 October 1942, Allahabad — Swiss Ephemeris, Lahiri ayanamsa, our own engine. Every one of them is identical at 3:30 a.m. and at 4:00 p.m., which is the only reason they are on this page at all. The full nine-graha table is in Lesson 02.
exalted · combust · ℞
The strongest planet in his chart is also the most buried
- Mercury runs speech, voice, script, timing and language. Virgo is the one sign where Mercury is both at home and exalted — the highest dignity a planet gets.
- It is also combust: 0°25′ from the Sun. Combustion is what classical texts call a planet standing so close to the Sun that it's lost in the glare. Twenty-five arc-minutes is roughly the width of a full moon.
- And retrograde — apparently moving backwards, traditionally read as a planet that works inwards first and shows its results late.
- Chitra nakshatra, pada 1. Chitra's symbol is a bright single jewel; its name means "the brilliant one".
exalted
The elder-statesman planet, at full strength
- Jupiter runs growth, teaching, judgement and the kind of authority people hand you rather than the kind you take. Cancer is its exaltation sign.
- Ours computes it at 0°29′ Cancer — it had crossed the boundary into exaltation less than half a degree earlier. Real, but only just; we'd rather tell you that than round it up.
- Punarvasu nakshatra, pada 4. Punarvasu means "good again" or "return of the light" — traditionally the star of restoration after loss.
- It sits three signs away from the crowded Virgo stack, which is the only part of his chart that isn't burnt, cramped or debilitated.
debilitated
The glamour planet, in the sign that gives it nothing
- Venus runs charm, money, comfort, beauty and being wanted. Virgo is its debilitation — the single sign where classical astrology gives Venus the least to work with.
- Hasta nakshatra, pada 2 — the star of the hand, tied to craft and to work done with the fingers rather than the face.
- Nine degrees and twenty minutes from the Sun, which puts it just outside the combustion orb for Venus. Close, but this one survives.
- Debilitated does not mean broken. Traditional reading: it gives late, it gives less easily, and what it gives has to be worked for rather than handed over.
neutral · 4-planet stack
Four planets in one sign, inside ten degrees
- The Sun runs ego, authority, visibility and the version of you the public gets. His sits in Virgo — neither exalted nor debilitated, a plain working placement.
- But it isn't alone. Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars are all in Virgo, spanning 14°32′ to 24°17′ — under ten degrees of sky between the four of them. That is a genuinely tight stellium.
- Chitra nakshatra, pada 1 — the same star as his Mercury.
- Two of those four are burnt by the Sun's proximity. That is the arithmetic cost of stacking planets around it.
nakshatra unsettled
The rashi is certain. The star it sits in is not.
- The Moon is the planet most Vedic "what's your rashi" answers actually mean. His sits in Libra (Tula) — and it does so at every single minute of 11 October 1942. That part is not in dispute at all.
- The nakshatra is. The Moon crosses out of Chitra and into Swati at 08:47 a.m. that morning. The 3:30 a.m. version gives Chitra; the 4:00 p.m. version gives Swati.
- Libra is ruled by Venus — which in his chart is the debilitated one. Chitra is ruled by Mars; Swati by Rahu.
- This is the placement that makes a dated dasha analysis impossible for him. Lesson 05 walks through exactly why.
℞ retrograde
The patience planet, running backwards
- Saturn runs delay, endurance, structure and the long unglamorous middle of things. His sits in Taurus, a sign it neither owns nor is exiled from.
- Rohini nakshatra, pada 3 — a star associated with growth, cultivation and slow material increase.
- Retrograde. Traditionally read as a Saturn whose lessons arrive out of order and land harder the second time.
- It is also the only planet in his chart sitting on the far side of the zodiac from the Virgo pile-up, alongside Jupiter — the two slow planets, both out of the crush.
Magha · ℞
The obsession planet, parked in the royal court
- Rahu runs hunger, sudden expansion, obsession and fame that arrives faster than anyone is ready for. His sits in Leo, the sign of kings and of the stage.
- Magha nakshatra, pada 3. Magha's symbol is a throne room, and its traditional theme is inherited lineage — ancestors, name, the weight of who came before you.
- Ketu, always exactly opposite, sits at 8°48′ Aquarius in Shatabhisha — the star of the healer and the hundred physicians.
- Both nodes compute as retrograde, which is normal: by the standard calculation the lunar nodes are retrograde essentially all the time. It is not a special flag on his chart.
Beyond the camera
Nearly called Inquilab
His parents planned to name him after the slogan Inquilab Zindabad — "long live the revolution". The poet Sumitranandan Pant talked them into Amitabh.
Rahu in Magha: the lineage star, holding the fame planet.He had a desk job
Before any of it, he was a business executive at Bird & Company, a shipping firm in Kolkata.
Very Virgo. Four planets' worth of Virgo, in fact.Born on war time
India ran clocks at UTC+6:30 from Sept 1942 to Oct 1945. His birth day sits inside that window — so even the timezone behind his kundli isn't the one most sites assume.
Doesn't move a single sign. Does move the arithmetic.Voice before face
His first screen credit, in 1969, wasn't a role — it was narrating Bhuvan Shome. The instrument was hired before the actor was.
Exalted Mercury, arriving ahead of everything else.The chart, raw
Computed by our own engine — not copied from anywhere. Signs only: with the birth minute disputed by more than twelve hours, there is no honest rising sign to draw.
Astrology, but make it make sense
Zero background needed. Read this once and you can decode the chart above yourself — no astrologer required.
What a birth chart even is
It's a photograph of the sky taken from one spot on Earth at one moment — where every planet was sitting, frozen. A janam kundli is that snapshot, drawn as a grid.
Vedic astrology treats it as the raw material you were handed, not your fate. A starting kit, not a script.
The nine planets, and what each one does
Nine of them — the seven visible bodies plus the two lunar nodes. Think of them as nine departments, each running one part of life.
| Planet | Runs | Where his is | Nakshatra |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☉ Sun | ego, authority, visibility | Virgo 23°52′ | Chitra |
| ☾ Moon | instinct, moods, gut feel | Libra | Chitra or Swati ⚠ |
| ♂ Mars | drive, conflict, the body | Virgo 22°16′ combust | Hasta |
| ☿ Mercury | speech, contracts, learning | Virgo 24°17′ ★ exalted ℞ combust | Chitra |
| ♃ Jupiter | growth, luck, judgement | Cancer 0°29′ ★ exalted | Punarvasu |
| ♀ Venus | charm, money, aesthetics | Virgo 14°32′ ▾ debilitated | Hasta |
| ♄ Saturn | patience, grind, delays | Taurus 19°15′ ℞ | Rohini |
| ☊ Rahu | obsession, sudden growth | Leo 8°48′ ℞ | Magha |
| ☋ Ketu | letting go, detachment | Aquarius 8°48′ ℞ | Shatabhisha |
Degrees are for 3:30 a.m.; at 4:00 p.m. every one of these signs, dignities and nakshatras is the same except the Moon's, which is the row flagged ⚠. That is the entire practical difference between the two disputed times, and it is a big one — Lesson 05 explains why.
Why "which sign" actually matters
Every planet has signs where it's comfortable and signs where it struggles. Same planet, different room.
- Exalted — the planet's best possible sign. Full strength. His Mercury (Virgo) and Jupiter (Cancer).
- Own sign — it owns the place. Mercury also owns Virgo, so it gets both at once.
- Debilitated — the sign directly opposite its exaltation. Least support. His Venus (Virgo).
- A stellium — several planets crowded into one sign. Not automatically good or bad, just a lot of weight in one room. His Virgo holds four.
Combustion — the bit almost nobody explains
When a planet passes very close to the Sun in the sky, you literally cannot see it — it's lost in the glare. Classical Jyotish calls that combust (asta), and treats it as a planet whose strength is present but obscured.
Each planet has its own orb. Mercury's is about 13°; Mars's about 17°; Venus's about 9°.
Mercury is 0°25′ from the Sun — deep inside the orb. About the width of a full moon.
Mars is 1°36′ away — also combust.
Venus is 9°20′ away — just outside its 9° orb, so it escapes. Debilitated, but not burnt.
So the sky on 11 October 1942 handed him the strongest possible Mercury and then stood it directly in front of a spotlight. Both things are true at once, and that's the honest reading — not "his voice was destined", not "his voice was cursed".
Dashas — and why we will not print his
Planets don't all act at once. Vedic astrology has them take turns running your life, for years at a stretch, in a fixed order. A planet's turn is a dasha. This is where every celebrity astrology page gets its "he was in his Saturn period when X happened" line.
Here is the part those pages don't tell you: the whole ladder is generated from one input — the exact position of the Moon at birth, specifically which nakshatra it was in and how far through that nakshatra it had travelled.
His Moon crosses from Chitra into Swati at 08:47 a.m. on 11 October 1942.
Chitra's lord is Mars. Swati's lord is Rahu.
The 3:30 a.m. version therefore opens his life with a Mars mahadasha. The 4:00 p.m. version opens it with a Rahu mahadasha — a different planet, running a different number of years, handing over to a different successor, and so on for all nine.
These are not two versions of the same timeline. They are two different timelines.
And even if you picked one, the dates would still be unusable: the Moon moves about 13° a day through nakshatras only 13°20′ wide, so the position within the star — which is what sets the starting balance — sweeps almost its entire range across a single day. We swept his in ten-minute steps: the end of the first mahadasha lands anywhere between 1942 and 1960 depending on the hour.
So there is no dasha table on this page. Not a hedged one, not an "approximate" one. If you find one elsewhere for him, the site picked a birth time and didn't mention it.
How we found 08:47 — the actual method
Worth showing, because it's arithmetic rather than opinion, and you could check it yourself.
We computed his chart at ten-minute intervals across the entire day — 145 charts — and watched the Moon's nakshatra. Coarse steps are dangerous here: a three-hour sweep can step straight over a boundary and make an unstable chart look rock solid. Then we narrowed by bisection until the crossing was pinned to the second.
Across the full day the Moon is in Chitra for about 39% of the hours and Swati for about 61%. Neither is a majority worth betting a whole page on.
What we genuinely can't tell you
A chart has two halves. Which sign each planet is in — that needs only the date, and it is why this page exists. And the houses, including the rising sign or lagna, which need the exact minute of birth.
His birth time is rated DD on Astro-Databank — conflicting sources, nothing verified. The two circulating versions are twelve and a half hours apart, which moves the ascendant across most of the zodiac.
So — is Amitabh Bachchan manglik?
A frequently searched question, and the honest answer is unsatisfying.
"Manglik" (mangal dosha) depends on which house Mars occupies — the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 8th or 12th, depending on which tradition you follow. Houses need the birth minute. His is disputed by half a day.
How to actually read that chart square
The grid earlier on this page is a South-Indian chart, the easiest of the three regional styles to learn, because the signs never move.
Twelve boxes around the edge, one per zodiac sign, always in the same places. Pisces top-left, then clockwise across the top, down the right side, back along the bottom, and up the left. Learn the ring once and you can read any South-Indian chart for the rest of your life.
Retrograde, without the drama
A word thrown around a lot that sounds far worse than it is.
Retrograde means a planet appeared to move backwards across the sky. It isn't actually reversing — it's an optical effect of Earth overtaking it in orbit, the way a slower car seems to slide backwards as you pass it. Traditionally it makes a planet's themes more internal and slower to show results.
Not a disaster either way. Anyone selling you a "remedy" for a retrograde node is selling you something.
What this can and can't tell you
Worth being blunt, since this page has spent a while treating a horoscope as a serious object.
- It can describe tendencies, and — given a verified minute — it can time long stretches. That part is arithmetic; two astrologers with the same birth data compute the same periods.
- It can't tell you what someone does with those tendencies. A great many people share an exalted Mercury without becoming the most recognisable voice in a country of a billion.
- It definitely can't explain, predict or excuse a real event — an accident, a company failing, a film landing. Anyone offering that certainty is guessing confidently.
Charts like his
What people ask about his kundli
What is Amitabh Bachchan's birth time?
There isn't one agreed answer. Two versions circulate for 11 October 1942: 3:30 a.m. — he has himself said he was born between 3 and 4 in the morning — and 4:00 p.m., which matches his father's autobiography describing an early-afternoon birth and is what several astrology databases use. Astro-Databank rates his data DD, meaning conflicting and unverified. Because the two are twelve and a half hours apart, this page publishes only what the date settles — planet signs, dignities and nakshatra options — and never a rising sign or a house.
What is Amitabh Bachchan's zodiac sign and nakshatra?
His Moon sits in Libra (Tula) — the rashi most Vedic answers actually mean — and it does so at every minute of his birth day, so that one is settled. His Sun is in Virgo (Kanya), which is what a Western-style answer would give. His birth nakshatra is not settled: the Moon leaves Chitra and enters Swati at 08:47 that morning, so the 3:30 a.m. version gives Chitra and the 4:00 p.m. version gives Swati. Both are printed confidently across the internet. Only one of them can be right, and nobody currently knows which.
What is Amitabh Bachchan's mahadasha right now?
We can't tell you, and neither can anyone else honestly. The Vimshottari dasha sequence is generated entirely from the birth nakshatra — and his falls on a boundary that his two candidate birth times straddle. Chitra hands the sequence to Mars; Swati hands it to Rahu. That produces two different ladders of planets running for different lengths in a different order, so there is no single "current mahadasha" to state. Our full analysis of the dasha question is in Lesson 05 above. If you want a real dasha timeline, it needs a verified minute — ours computes yours from your own birth details in a few seconds.
Is Amitabh Bachchan manglik?
Not answerable without a verified birth time. Manglik status depends on which house Mars occupies, and houses need the exact minute. What is certain at every hour of 11 October 1942: his Mars is in Virgo — a neutral sign for Mars — in Hasta nakshatra, and it is deeply combust, sitting 1°36′ from the Sun. Anyone giving you a firm yes or no has quietly chosen one of the two disputed times. See Lesson 08 for the long version.