Prayer Times in India

Muslims and mosques in India

India has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. The 2011 census, the latest to publish religion figures, counted 172,245,158 Muslims, 14.2% of the population, which makes Islam the country's second-largest religion, and Pew Research ranked India third in the world for its number of Muslims. The largest numbers live in Uttar Pradesh (about 38.5 million), West Bengal (24.7 million), Assam (10.7 million), Kerala (8.9 million) and Jammu and Kashmir (8.6 million), while Lakshadweep, the island territory off Kerala, has a Muslim majority. Most Indian Muslims are Sunni, with a Shia minority concentrated in places such as Lucknow, Hyderabad and Kargil.

Islam arrived early. Arab traders brought it to Gujarat and the Malabar Coast of Kerala soon after the faith emerged in Arabia, and the Cheraman Juma Mosque in Kerala is traditionally dated to 629 CE and attributed to Malik Deenar, which tradition counts among the oldest mosques outside Arabia. In the north, centuries of Sultanate and Mughal rule left monuments such as the Jama Masjid in Delhi, and the learned traditions of Deoband, Bareilly and Lucknow still shape many mosques today. The country's main Muslim bodies include Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the seminary of Darul Uloom Deoband, and the Barelvi movement is also widely followed.

The legal schools follow the map. Most Indian Muslims follow the Hanafi school, which is why this site uses Hanafi Asr for the country, but Muslims in Kerala, Lakshadweep and coastal Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada) follow the Shafi'i school, so cities in those places show the Standard Asr time first. Mosque timetables across the country overwhelmingly use the Karachi (University of Islamic Sciences) angles of 18 degrees for both Fajr and Isha, because India has no national authority that publishes one official timetable.

India's size makes local times differ from what a single clock suggests. The whole country uses Indian Standard Time, UTC+5:30, although it stretches across almost 30 degrees of longitude, so Maghrib in Guwahati comes more than an hour earlier by the clock than in Ahmedabad, and a prayer time copied from another city can be wrong by a long way. From the far north at about 34 degrees in Srinagar to Kanyakumari near 8 degrees, the length of the day also varies far less in the south than in the north through the year. The calendar is decided locally: committees such as the Markazi Chand Committee in Lucknow and the imams of Delhi's Jama Masjid, institutions in Patna and other bodies announce their own decisions, so Ramadan and Eid can fall on different days in different cities. In 2026 India's committee announced Ramadan for 19 February, a day after many Gulf countries. Congregation times are set by each mosque.

Sources, checked 2026-10: Wikipedia: Islam in India (2011 census); Gulf News: India declares first day of Ramadan (2026).