India does not have four seasons. It has six, and the classical texts counted them long before anyone thought to standardise the calendar.
Ritucharya is the seasonal regimen, and it is the companion piece to dinacharya. Charaka gives it the sixth chapter of the Sutrasthana; Vagbhata takes it up in the third chapter of the Ashtanga Hridaya. Where the daily regimen orders the hours, the seasonal one orders the year.
Six seasons, two halves
The six ritus are shishira, the late winter; vasanta, the spring; grishma, the summer; varsha, the rains; sharad, the autumn that follows them; and hemanta, the early winter.
They are grouped into two halves. Adana kala, the northern course, runs from late winter through summer, and the texts describe it as the period in which strength is drawn out of the body. Visarga kala, the southern course, runs from the rains through early winter, and is described as the period in which it is returned.
It is a farmer's calendar as much as a physician's, and it reads like one. The instruction for each season is mostly about what to eat, what to avoid, and how much to ask of yourself.
The year was not treated as weather happening to a person. It was treated as something the person was inside.
What this looks like in a Delhi year
Anyone who has spent a summer in north India already knows most of this without the vocabulary.
By late May the evening does not cool until well after dark, and appetite goes first. In varsha, when the rains come, the air holds water and everything feels slower and heavier, the digestion included. Sharad, the weeks after the monsoon withdraws, is bright and sharp and, in the classical reading, the season most associated with heat in the body. Then hemanta arrives, the mornings turn, appetite returns properly, and by January the evening is genuinely cold and the year has closed.
Six seasons is not folklore. It is a more accurate description of the subcontinent than four.
An evening that is not the same in July as in January
A ritual kept every night will meet all six of these, and it will not feel identical in any two of them. This is worth knowing in advance, because the first instinct on a night when it feels different is to assume something has gone wrong.
In the humidity of varsha, vapour hangs. The air is already carrying water, the aromatic sits closer and lasts longer, and a shorter session is often enough. In the dry cold of hemanta and shishira, the opposite: the vapour lifts and disperses quickly, and the warmth of the vessel becomes a larger part of what you are there for. In grishma, when the room itself is hot, the practice belongs later in the evening than it does in December, and a greater distance from the vessel is more comfortable.
The pod does not change. The room does, and so does the person in it.
What we take from it
ZANAR does not issue seasonal instructions and does not intend to. Ritucharya is not a set of rules the House is passing on.
What we take from it is a habit of attention. A practice kept across a whole year teaches you the year, which is a slower and better piece of information than most of what is available in an evening. The tradition was making a modest claim, and it holds: the same act, at the same hour, in a different season, is a different act.
Nidravati Vidhana is an aromatherapy preparation for the inhalation of vapour only. It is not a medicine, and no part of it is to be ingested.