A Girl's Curiosity, and a Basket on a River
Kunti was born Pritha, daughter of the Yadava chief Shurasena, and given in childhood to her father's childless cousin Kuntibhoja to be raised as his own, which is where the name she is known by comes from. As a young girl in Kuntibhoja's household, she was given charge of looking after the irritable and famously hard-to-please sage Durvasa during an extended stay, and she did it so carefully and so well that Durvasa, pleased, gave her a mantra as a gift before he left: a chant that would let her summon any deva she wished, who would then grant her a child by his own power, without any ordinary union being required.
The adoption also explains a relationship that runs through the rest of the epic without always being spelled out: Kunti's birth father, Shurasena, was also the father of Vasudeva, Krishna's own father, which made Kunti and Vasudeva siblings and Krishna, by blood, first cousin to the five sons Kunti would eventually raise. Krishna's lifelong closeness to the Pandavas, and his willingness to serve as Arjuna's charioteer decades later, traces back to this one adoption arranged for a chief's daughter long before any of the children involved were born.
Kunti, still unmarried and simply curious about whether the gift actually worked, tested it once before she had any real use for it. She invoked Surya, the sun god, and the mantra performed exactly as promised. She conceived and, in time, bore a son already marked as extraordinary, carrying natural armor and earrings that some tellings describe as part of his very body. Unmarried and terrified of the shame that an unmarried mother would face, and of what it would mean for the marriage still ahead of her, Kunti set the infant afloat in a basket on a river rather than raise him herself. He was found downstream by a charioteer couple, Adhiratha and Radha, who raised him as their own. That child was Karna, and Kunti told no one what she had done for decades afterward.
The mantra itself she kept, and told no one about, for years more, carrying both the gift and its first, quietly buried consequence into her marriage to Pandu, the king of Hastinapura, without either being known to him at the time.
Four More Invocations
Pandu carried a curse of his own. Having accidentally killed a sage who was mating in the form of a deer, Pandu was cursed that he would die the moment he approached a woman in intimacy, which left the question of an heir for Hastinapura genuinely open. Kunti, some years into the marriage, finally told Pandu about the mantra Durvasa had given her, and, with his encouragement, agreed to use it again, this time openly and with her husband's knowledge, to give him the sons the curse would not otherwise allow.
She invoked three gods in turn. Dharma, the god of righteousness and moral order, fathered Yudhishthira. Vayu, the wind god, fathered Bhima, whose strength the tradition attributes directly to his father's nature. Indra, king of the gods and the deity of valor in battle, fathered Arjuna. Each invocation was separate, and each child, in the tradition's own reading, carries forward a recognisable trait of the god who fathered him: Yudhishthira's devotion to dharma even at high personal cost, Bhima's raw physical power, Arjuna's mastery as a warrior.
Kunti did not keep the mantra to herself after that. At Pandu's request, she shared it with Madri, his second wife, so that she too could have children despite the same curse standing between her and Pandu. Madri used it once, invoking the twin Ashwini Kumaras, the physician gods associated with healing, youth and beauty, and because they came as a pair rather than singly, she bore two sons at once, Nakula and Sahadeva. Five sons in total, fathered across four separate invocations of the same mantra, by two wives of one cursed king, before any of the five had ever met the woman who would one day marry all of them together.
The curse eventually caught up with Pandu regardless of the sons he now had. Years later, overcome by desire at the sight of Madri in a spring forest, he approached her despite the warning he had lived under for so long, and died in her arms exactly as the curse had promised. Madri, in grief and in a decision Kunti is said to have contested, chose to join him on his funeral pyre, leaving her twin sons in Kunti's sole care alongside her own three, which is how one mother, through a mantra she had first tested out of simple curiosity as a girl, ended up raising all five Pandavas together.
Deciding a Marriage Before It Happened
It would be some years yet before any of these five sons met Draupadi at her swayamvara, but the mantra had already, in a real sense, decided who would eventually stand there to win her. By the time Arjuna strung the bow that Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula and Sahadeva would each go on to share a marriage with, the identity of all five men, and the specific divine trait each carried into that marriage, had been fixed years earlier by Kunti's four invocations. Draupadi's later, unusual marriage to all five brothers together, one of the few instances of polyandry the tradition treats seriously rather than as scandal, and one the text feels obliged to explain through Vyasa's account of a boon Draupadi herself had asked for across an earlier life, was in this sense set in motion before she was even born, by a mantra her future husbands' mother had tested on a whim as a girl.
The tradition reads the five sons less as five interchangeable brothers than as five distinct qualities bound into one family: Yudhishthira's dharma, Bhima's strength, Arjuna's skill, and the Ashwins' shared gifts of healing and grace in Nakula and Sahadeva. Devotional retellings often use this to explain why the Pandavas function as a single complete unit through the epic rather than as five separate heroes who happen to be related, since between them they cover the qualities a single ideal king could not embody alone.
Kunti kept the older secret, Karna's birth, for the rest of her life until the war made it impossible to hide any longer. She went to Karna directly before the fighting began, telling him the truth and asking him to join his brothers rather than fight them, and Karna, already bound to Duryodhana by loyalty and gratitude, refused to switch sides but promised her that he would not kill any of her other sons except Arjuna, whichever of them faced him. It is one of the epic's quietest, saddest scenes, a mother's mantra from her girlhood finally catching up with her, decades later, on the eve of a war it had helped set in motion long before anyone involved knew it.
Quick Answers
What was the mantra Durvasa gave Kunti?+
It was a chant that let her summon any deva she wished, who would then grant her a child by his own power without an ordinary union being required. She received it as a reward for looking after Durvasa carefully during an extended stay in her foster father's household.
How many times did Kunti use the mantra, and who did she invoke?+
She used it four times in total. As a girl she invoked Surya and bore Karna, whom she set afloat on a river. Later, with Pandu's knowledge, she invoked Dharma for Yudhishthira, Vayu for Bhima and Indra for Arjuna. She also taught it to Madri, who invoked the Ashwini twins together and bore Nakula and Sahadeva.
Why is Kunti's mantra connected to Draupadi's marriage to five brothers?+
The mantra determined the identity and divine nature of the exact five men who would later, together, marry Draupadi, years before any of them had met her. In that sense the marriage's participants, and the distinct qualities each brought to it, were fixed by Kunti's invocations long before the swayamvara took place.
When did Kunti reveal Karna's true parentage to her other sons?+
She kept it secret for decades, revealing it only to Karna himself just before the war began, and asking him to join his brothers. Karna refused to switch sides but promised not to kill any of the Pandavas except Arjuna, and Kunti's other sons learned the full truth only after Karna's death in the war.
About the author
Anjali Mehta · Editor, M.A. Religious Studies
Anjali is the managing editor for Vandnaa and oversees the festival and vrat coverage. She holds an M.A. in Religious Studies and reviews every published article for accuracy, accessibility, and tradition-fidelity.
Meet the Vandnaa editorial team →