Look up the age for a mundan and you will be told the first year, or the third, or the fifth, or the seventh, or anywhere from six months to seven years, all with equal confidence.
The sources are not confused. The rule is: first or third year for a Brahmin child, fifth for a Kshatriya, seventh for a Vaishya. It is graded by varna, and what the listicles have done is average a ladder into a range.
Whether that ladder is a thing your family observes is a separate question and mostly the answer is no, people do it when it suits. But it is why the sources look like they disagree.
What it is
Chudakarana in Sanskrit, mundan across the Hindi belt, jawal in Marathi, choulam in Tamil, zarra-kaa-saai for Kashmiri Pandits. The child's first haircut, taken off completely, as one of the sixteen samskaras.
The reasoning given is that the hair a child is born with carries whatever it carried from before, and removing it starts the child clean. Practical explanations get offered too, about heat and about the hair growing back thicker, and the second one is not true, but the ceremony does not need it to be.
In Marathi practice the timing is given more usefully than anywhere else: nine to eighteen months, once the fontanelle has started to close. That is a real reason expressed as a rule.
Where
At home with a barber, at your kul devta temple, or at a pilgrimage site, and all three are normal.
Tirumala is the largest by a wide margin. There are separate kalyana-katta facilities for men, women and infants; you get a token with a room number and one fresh blade. The story behind it is Neela Devi, who covered a wound on Srinivasa's head with her own hair, and his promise that anyone offering theirs would be relieved of what they had accumulated.
A fact that sits oddly next to that, and is worth knowing anyway: Tirumala collected around 157 tonnes of hair in 2019 and sold it for about 1.6 million dollars. It is among the most valuable hair in the world for wigs, and Israeli rabbinical authorities have twice ruled it unusable for Jewish wigs precisely because of where it comes from.
Kashmiri Pandit practice, from one author writing his community's memory rather than a source we can generalise from: at Kheer Bhawani, Jwala Ji at Khrew or Hari Parbat, with a homa treated as essential and scissors rather than a razor for the first cut.
Is mundan necessary for a baby girl
This is the most asked question about the ceremony and the pages that rank for it do not answer it. The honest answer is in a comment thread on a parenting board, four women, opened in 2013 and still getting replies three years later.
The first one describes her own household. In some houses, she says, a boy's mundan is celebrated with huge pomp and show, and for a girl they do it at a nearby parlour.
A second woman says the same thing about her neighbours: they took a scissor and shaved her themselves at home, no puja, no proper ceremony, nothing.
A third replies that she is shocked, and that she has never heard of such a thing happening.
A fourth, a year later, tells the rest of them to stop complaining and just do it: if you have young female kids of age two and up, do their mundan with the same pomp, and others will follow.
So: the samskara is nominally for both, and in a lot of South Indian practice it plainly is for both, which is why Tirumala has infant facilities that both use. What is unequal is not the haircut. It is the ceremony and the money around it, in some households and not others, and there are women who have never seen it happen and women describing it in their own family.
All four of those are true at once and printing only one of them is how you lose a reader who lives in the other version.
The hair
Three disposals, all normal. Immersed in a river, Ganga most often, sometimes mixed with cow dung first. Buried, in earth or near a tree. Or offered at the kul devi's feet.
The Kashmiri version is the most specific we found: kept safely inside the house with walnuts, and immersed later at the right time, with some families carrying it to Gangabal.
What to give
Here is the finding, and we are printing it rather than hiding it. Every single result for mundan gift ideas is a shop. Jewellery storefronts, hamper sellers, Instagram sellers. There is no non-commercial source in the results at all.
Their convergent recommendation is silver: coins with a deity on them, bangles, anklets, a bowl and spoon set. Silver is genuinely traditional for an infant and that advice is not wrong. It is just the only advice available, from people selling silver.
What we can say from a non-commercial source runs the other way entirely. In Kashmiri Pandit practice the paternal aunt prepared the feast and received gifts, of rice and salt, rather than giving them. The direction of the giving is not universal.
Practically: ₹501 or ₹1,100 in an envelope for the child, or a small silver thing if you would rather give an object, and mithai either way. If the family is doing it at Tirumala or another temple, the travel is the expensive part and money is the more useful gift.
Questions people ask
›Is mundan necessary for a baby girl?
The samskara applies to both, and in much of South India it is straightforwardly done for both. What varies is the ceremony around it: women on parenting boards describe boys getting a full function and girls getting a parlour trip in the same household, while other women in the same thread say they have never seen that. Whether it happens depends on the family, not on the rule.
›At what age should mundan be done?
The classical rule is graded: first or third year for Brahmins, fifth for Kshatriyas, seventh for Vaishyas, which is why every page gives a different number. In practice most families do it between one and three. Marathi practice gives the most useful version: nine to eighteen months, once the fontanelle has begun to close.
›What do you give at a mundan?
₹501 or ₹1,100 in an envelope, or something small in silver. Worth knowing that every page recommending silver is a shop selling silver, and that there is no non-commercial guidance on this anywhere we could find.
›What happens to the hair?
Immersed in a river, buried in earth or near a tree, or offered at the family deity's temple. Kashmiri Pandit families keep it in the house with walnuts and immerse it later. At Tirumala the temple keeps it, and sells it.
›Does the hair really grow back thicker?
No. Shaving does not change the follicle, and regrowth looks thicker only because a blunt cut end is wider than a tapered tip. The ceremony does not need the claim to be true.