Samay is a unit of time representing the blink of an eye, or about a quarter of a second

Second

The second is a unit of measurement of time, and is the International System of Units base unit of time. It may be measured using a clock....

. An ordered set of these instants is known as an Avalia.

It was the only basic unit of time in ancient Hindu mythology. It means "time" in Indian languages such as Bengali

Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...

, Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...

, Marathi

Marathi language

Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...

, Gujurati

Gujarati language

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages...

 and others.

Samay in music

Samay is a term used to loosely categorize ragas into times of days. Ragas are divided into prahaars whereby each raga has a specific period of the day when it is performed.

In Gandharva-Veda the day is divided into three-hour-long intervals: 4-7 a.m., 7-10 a.m. etc. The time concept in Ghandarva-Veda is more strictly adhered to than it would be, for example, in carnatic music

Carnatic music

Carnatic music is a system of music commonly associated with the southern part of the Indian subcontinent, with its area roughly confined to four modern states of India: Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu...

.