Kuntī

Kuntī was born Prithā, a princess of the Yādava clan, daughter of Shūrasena and sister of Vāsudeva, who would be the father of Lord Krishna; so that Kuntī was Krishna's own aunt, a thread that binds her to the divine heart of the whole story. Because her father's cousin Kuntibhoja was childless, Prithā was given to him in adoption, and took from him the name Kuntī.

When she was still a girl, the formidable sage Durvāsā, famous for his terrible temper, stayed as a guest in Kuntibhoja's palace; and the young Kuntī served him with such unwavering patience, devotion, and care, never once giving him cause for his notorious anger, that the sage was deeply pleased, and granted her a divine boon: a mantra, by which, if she called upon any god, that god would appear to her and bless her with a son equal to himself in glory.

And here the young Kuntī made the error of the innocent and the impatient, and it would shadow her whole life. Out of simple girlish curiosity, wishing to see whether so wonderful a power could truly be real, she tested the mantra then and there. Looking up at the sky, she invoked Sūrya, the Sun God. And at once the heavens darkened, and Sūrya himself stood before her, radiant and undeniable.

Terrified now of the scandal, Kuntī begged him to depart; but the mantra's power could not be recalled, and Sūrya, bound by it, blessed her with a child, though he restored her virginity afterward as the boon allowed.

So Kuntī, unmarried and afraid of public ruin, bore a son in secret; and he was a radiant child, born wearing golden armour and golden earrings, fused to his very body. And Kuntī, in her fear and her desperation, did a thing that would break her heart for the rest of her life: she placed the baby in a sealed basket and set it afloat upon the river, casting away her firstborn son to save herself from disgrace.

The basket was found downstream by Adhiratha, a charioteer, who was childless; and he and his wife Rādhā raised the boy as their own, and named him Karṇa.

And so Karṇa, born of the Sun and of a princess, was raised as the son of a charioteer, not knowing his true birth; and the secret of his origin, and Kuntī's abandonment of him, would become one of the deepest tragedies of the whole epic, for he would grow up to stand against his own unknown brothers, and Kuntī would carry, through all the years, the unbearable knowledge of the son she had cast away.

Later, in the proper course of her life, Kuntibhoja held a svayamvara for Kuntī, and there she placed the marriage garland upon King Pāṇḍu, and became his queen. But she carried her secret and her divine mantra with her; and now, in the forest, hearing her husband grieve over his childlessness under the sage's curse, she revealed to Pāṇḍu that she held the power to call down the gods themselves for sons, and so opened the way for the birth of the heroes who would be the heart of the story to come.