Queen Kunti

Pritha, Durvasa and the river

She was born Pritha, daughter of Shura, a chief of the Yadavas and the father of Vasudeva, which made her the aunt of Krishna. Shura gave her as a child to his childless cousin Kuntibhoja, and in his house she took the name Kunti. There she served the irascible sage Durvasa so well that he gave her a mantra to call down any god and bear his son.

Still unmarried and curious, she tried it on the sun. Surya came, and she bore a boy born with armour and earrings. Afraid of disgrace, she set him adrift in a basket on the river. The charioteer Adhiratha and his wife Radha found him and raised him as Karna.

Queen of Pandu

At her swayamvara Kunti chose Pandu of Hastinapura, who later took Madri of Madra as a second wife. When Pandu was cursed to die if he ever lay with a wife, Kunti told him of the mantra. By Dharma she bore Yudhishthira, by Vayu Bhima, and by Indra Arjuna. She shared the mantra once with Madri, who called the Ashvins and bore the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. After Pandu died, Madri followed him onto the pyre, and Kunti brought all five boys to Hastinapura.

At the princes' tournament she recognised Karna in the arena and fainted, and still said nothing.

The mother's word

She escaped the burning house of lac at Varanavata with her sons and lived in hiding at Ekachakra, where she sent Bhima to face the demon Baka so that her Brahmin host would not lose a child. When her sons came home with Draupadi, Kunti told them, without looking, to share what they had brought, and the word held.

She spent the thirteen years of exile in Vidura's house. When peace failed, she sent her sons the story of Vidula, a mother who shamed her son into fighting. On the eve of war she went to Karna on the bank of the Ganga and told him who he was. He would not change sides, but he promised she would still have five sons: he would spare all but Arjuna.

The secret told and the last fire

After the war, at the water rites for the dead, she told her sons that Karna had been their eldest brother. Yudhishthira, stricken, cursed all women never again to keep a secret. Fifteen years later Kunti refused the palace she had fought for and went to a hermitage on the Ganga to serve Dhritarashtra and Gandhari. She died beside them in a forest fire.

Why readers argue about her

Kunti is the epic's hardest-headed survivor. She urged her sons to war and then renounced its prize. Readers still argue over her silence about Karna, and whether it was a frightened girl's mistake or a lifetime of choosing her other sons over him.