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What is a Kundali?
In short
What is a kundali?
A kundali is a birth chart — a diagram of where every graha stood, as seen from your birthplace, at the moment you were born. It shows the lagna, the twelve houses, the nine grahas and their positions by rashi and nakshatra. To calculate one you need the date, the time as precisely as possible, and the place of birth.
What the chart contains
A kundali fixes three things: the lagna, the position of each of the nine grahas, and the resulting houses. The nine grahas are the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the two lunar nodes, Rahu and Ketu — which are mathematical points, not bodies, being where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic.
In the whole-sign house system used across most of India and Nepal, the rashi containing the lagna is the whole first house, the next rashi the second, and so on. That is why a house and a rashi are often spoken about interchangeably in a Vedic reading, in a way they are not in Western astrology.
Why birth time matters so much
The grahas move slowly enough that a few minutes of error changes nothing about their rashi placements — except the Moon, which moves about half a degree an hour. But the lagna advances through the whole zodiac every day, so the houses depend entirely on the recorded time.
If the birth time is uncertain, a chart can still be read from the Moon rather than the lagna. That is a genuine traditional method, not a fallback, and it is the basis of the daily rashifal.