Kunti

Five Sons, and a Count

Pandu is living in the forest with his two wives, Kunti and Madri, and a curse has closed the road to children. In the Adi Parva he asks Kunti to bear sons by some worthy man; she draws back, and then opens her secret to him, the mantra from her girlhood by which she may summon any god she chooses. The name of the sun she does not speak. She offers sacrifice and calls Dharma, and Yudhishthira is born. She calls Vayu and asks for a son of great strength and large limbs who will crush the pride of everyone; one day that infant slips from her lap when a tiger startles her, and the rock he lands on breaks into a hundred fragments. After a year of Pandu’s austerities she calls Indra, and Arjuna is born. Pandu wants more sons, and Kunti refuses him. For Madri she gives the mantra once, and Madri thinks of the twin Ashvins and gets two sons at a single asking; Pandu asks again on her behalf, and Kunti refuses again: “With a single gift of the mantra Madri has contrived to get two sons at once. I fear she will soon pass me in number.” One spring day Pandu forgets the curse in a flowering wood and dies in Madri’s arms, and the two widows divide between them the right to follow him. Kunti says that she is the elder wife, that the duty is hers, and that Madri should raise the boys; Madri answers that her own desire was left unfulfilled and that she could never raise all five with an equal heart, so the burden of living must fall to Kunti. The long road to Hastinapura, for a woman who has never known hardship, seems short. Years later, in the arena, when Karna walks in, Kunti, the daughter of Bhoja, reads what all this means, and faints; Vidura brings her round, and she tells no one anything.

The Mother Who Sends Her Son to a Rakshasa

Out of the house of lac the family crosses the Ganga in the boat Vidura sent, and through the dark forest Bhima carries his mother on his shoulder. At Ekachakra the turn comes for the Brahmin who shelters them to send the rakshasa Baka his meal and a human being with it. Kunti takes the Brahmin to Bhima, and Bhima says, “So be it.” Yudhishthira comes home, sits down beside his mother in private, and asks what task she has given the man on whose arms they all sleep soundly; have their misfortunes clouded her understanding? Her answer is the clearest portrait of her in the poem. “Do not be anxious for Bhima. I have not come to this decision through any weakness of understanding.” This Brahmin has honored them and hidden them where Dhritarashtra‘s sons cannot find them, and a good man does not forget a kindness; he returns it with more. She has seen the death of Hidimba; she remembers the rock that broke under an infant; “His arms have the strength of ten thousand elephants.” In the hall of the Panchalas, on the day of the svayamvara, the sons come home late to the potter’s house and tell the mother sitting in the inner room that they have brought the day’s alms, and without looking up she answers, “Enjoy it, all of you together.” A moment later she sees Draupadi. “What have I said?” A word once spoken cannot be allowed to become a lie, and she takes Draupadi by the hand and stands before Yudhishthira. After the dice, Vidura says that Pritha is a princess by birth, that the forest is no place for her, and that she will live in his house; and as Draupadi leaves for the forest in a single garment, Kunti blesses her with a choked voice and ends with a request: “While you live in the woods, keep an eye on my child Sahadeva.” Then she follows her weeping daughter-in-law out into the street.

A Kshatriya Woman’s Message

In the Udyoga Parva Krishna, come to Hastinapura as the envoy of peace, goes in the afternoon to his aunt’s house, and the moment she sees him at the door she throws both arms around his neck and the weeping she has held back for fourteen years comes out of her all at once. She asks after each son by name. Then she names the root of her sorrows, and it is neither Duryodhana nor herself. “I was a child with a ball in my hands, Keshava, when your grandfather gave me to his friend, the illustrious Kuntibhoja.” Abandoned by her father, then by her father-in-law. “For all practical purposes, Janardana, my children are dead to me and I am dead to them.” Then her voice changes, and what had been a mother’s lament becomes the message of a Kshatriya woman to her sons, sentence by sentence, each one aimed. She tells the story of Vidula, the mother who shamed a defeated son back onto his feet, and then speaks to each of her own: to Arjuna the voice heard over his birth, to Bhima that “the time has come, the time a Kshatriya woman bears a son for.” And at the end the thing that has cut deepest in all those years. The loss of the kingdom leaves her unmoved, and so does the defeat at dice; the wound is Draupadi: “that the noble and beautiful Draupadi, weeping in the middle of the assembly, had to hear those cruel and insulting words: that is what grieves me most.”

A Mother Standing in the Shade

Krishna’s embassy fails, and Vidura tells Kunti that Duryodhana will listen to no one. Then she remembers the mantra, and a resolve hardens in her. On the bank of the Ganga Karna stands facing east at his worship of the sun, and behind him an old woman waits in the heat until she looks like a garland of lotuses wilting in the glare; at last she steps into the shade of her son’s upper garment. He turns. “I am Karna, son of Radha and Adhiratha. Why have you come here, lady?” And the answer: “You are Kunti’s son, not Radha’s.” She tells him that she brought him forth while she was still a maiden, that the sun begot him, that he was born in Kuntiraja’s palace wearing earrings and mail that grew from his body; “You are Partha.” A voice full of affection comes out of the disc of the sun: “What Pritha has said is true.” Karna’s heart does not move. “Mother, you gave me up the moment I was born. If I am a Kshatriya, then because of you I have gone without all the rites of a Kshatriya. You never once sought my good as a mother should. And today you speak to me, and it is your own good you seek.” And yet her plea does not come away empty. He will fight only Arjuna; the other four he could kill, and will not. “Famed lady, the number of your sons will never fall below five. Five it will always be: with me if Arjuna falls, or with Arjuna if I am slain.” Trembling with grief, Kunti embraces the son who will not be moved, and tells him that everything is fate. After the war, at the water rite on that same bank, she turns suddenly to her sons: “Offer the water to that eldest brother of yours, who was born of me by the god of day. He was born with a pair of earrings, and clad in armor, and he was like Surya himself in splendor.” Yudhishthira, breathing like a snake, asks how she could have kept such a son hidden, like a fire in the folds of a cloth, and sends for Karna’s family to offer the water with them. The Bhagavatam watches the same hour in its own way: when Krishna sets his foot on the step of his chariot to go home to Dwarka, Kunti stops him with joined palms and asks for the one thing nobody asks, “Let calamities fall on us at every step, and let them keep falling, through this life and through every life to come,” because in calamity his darshan is certain. That prayer belongs to the Bhagavatam’s own story, and is only named here.

Gandhari’s Hand on Her Shoulder

Fifteen years after the war Dhritarashtra leaves for the forest, and on the day of departure Kunti walks in front, with the hand of the blindfolded Gandhari resting on her shoulder. Yudhishthira tells her to turn back with her daughters-in-law, and Kunti walks on without answering. When she speaks, she gives instructions. “Never show any disregard for Sahadeva. Always keep Karna in mind, who never turned back from a battle. Through my folly that hero was killed on the field.” Bhima asks where this wish has come from, now that the kingdom is won and the time has come to enjoy it, and his mother lays out her whole account: she put courage into sons who had lost at dice so that Pandu’s name would not die, so that Bhima’s strength would not go to waste, so that Draupadi’s insult would not go unanswered. “It was not for my own sake that I urged you on through Vasudeva with the stirring words of Vidula.” She has already enjoyed the fruits of the sovereignty her husband won; she wants none of what her children won; she will earn by her own austerity the world her husband reached. The Pandavas stop, ashamed. In the forest Pritha becomes Gandhari’s eyes. One day Vyasa comes, and it is before him that Kunti tells the story this portrait began with, and adds, “This burns me, as you well know,” and asks to see that son once; Vyasa answers that in the birth of Karna no fault is ascribable to her, and for one night draws the dead up out of the river. Two years later Narada comes to Hastinapura with the news. A forest fire broke out near the Ganga; the king, wasted by fasting, could not move, and neither could the two queens. “Go, Sanjaya, to some place where the fire cannot burn you. As for us, we will let our bodies be destroyed by this fire and attain the highest goal.” The king sat down facing east with Gandhari and Kunti, and the three of them withdrew their senses and sat unmoving as wooden posts while the fire came. Yudhishthira, in his grief, imagines his mother, thin and trembling, crying “my son Yudhishthira,” and “save me, Bhima,” as the flames closed in; and Narada answers that the fire was no unholy fire, that it sprang from the king’s own abandoned sacrificial fires, and that Kunti attained success through her service.

Her Path

The Svayamvara of Draupadi · A sentence spoken from an inner room without looking, and the fear of letting it become a lie.

Kunti’s Message · The story of a defeated son’s mother, and the words “the time has come,” sent to Bhima.

Kunti’s Prayer in the Bhagavatam · Krishna‘s foot on the step of his chariot, and a request for calamity that nobody else makes.

What She Hid, and What She Asked For

At every turn of Kunti’s life there is a request, and beside it a silence. She asks Vayu for strength and Indra for a son of worldwide fame, and claims from Pandu the right to bear no more; she sends Bhima to pay a Brahmin’s debt and talks Yudhishthira into it; she has Krishna carry the story of Vidula to her sons, and brings away from Karna a pledge of safety for four of them. Under all of it runs a count, five sons, never once called six, from the faint in the arena to the water offered on the bank of the Ganga. The poem makes her open that silence three times with her own mouth, before Karna, before her sons, and last before Vyasa, where she calls it her own fault and asks to see the lost son for a single night. The kingdom her children won she will not take; she walks into the forest with Gandhari‘s hand on her shoulder, and of the fire that takes her Narada says that it was sacred. The girl who wanted one morning only to learn whether a mantra was true lives by that same measure to the end: everything she asked for was given, and what she hid, she paid for herself.