Kunti
Kunti ( Sanskrit कुंती kuntī f.) Is a figure of Indian mythology in the Mahabharata and the mother of the older three and the foster mother of the two younger Pandavas . Consequently, Kunti is a central figure in the epic. The Bhagavatapurana contains 26 prayers that Kunti addresses to the protector of her family Krishna , which is why she is considered a model for the practice of Bhakti yoga , especially in Vishnu Hinduism .
myth
Pritha is the beautiful daughter of Surasena , a king of the Yadu dynasty. Surasena lets her grow up with his childless cousin Kuntibhoja , where she is given the name Kunti and is responsible for the well-being of his guests. When the wise Durvasas was a guest, he was so pleased with Kunti's selfless willingness to serve that he made her a gift: since he foresaw that she will have a man who will not be able to father children because of a curse, he teaches her Mantra with which she can invoke any god and get pregnant by him. A little later she calls on the sun god Surya and receives from him the son Karna . However, since she is unmarried, she puts the newborn in a basket and lets it drift down the Ganges in the hope that it would be found and raised by another family.
She marries King Pandu of Hastinapur , the younger brother of Dhritarashtra , who was excluded from the succession because of his blindness and was only allowed to rule in Pandu's absence. When Pandu accidentally kills a hermit while hunting, he retreats to the woods with his wives Kunti and Madri as a penance and leaves the crown to his older brother until a future descendant would rule. At her husband's behest, Kunti invokes the embodiment of the religious principles Dharma , from whom she receives the virtuous Yudhishthira . Next, he asks her for a son with extraordinary physical strength, whereupon she invokes the wind god Vayu and gives birth to the second son Bhima . After a year of renunciation, he asked her to call Indra , from whom she received her third son Arjuna . Meanwhile, Madri fathered the twins Nakula and Sahadeva with the Ashvins , the gods of sunrise and sunset, with the help of the mantra of Kunti .
Pandu dies because of the curse. Madri follows her husband to death, so that the five Pandavas are now under the sole care of Kunti. A group of wise men brings Kunti and the Pandavas to Hastinapur, where the Pandavas of Dhritarashtra and his half-brother Vidura receive a courtly education and the eldest son Yudhishthira is supposed to take over rule when he comes of age. Dhritarashtra and his wife Gandhari had a hundred sons, the Kauravas , of whom Duryodhana is the oldest and also the most ambitious who wants to ascend the throne himself. Under the guidance of Duryodhanas and with the approval of Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas carry out several assassinations on the Pandavas entitled to the throne. When they lure Kunti with the Pandavas into a shellac palace and set it on fire, they can only escape via a tunnel, the location of which was previously revealed to them by Vidura. To avoid further attacks, they hide in the forest for a year.
After returning to Hastinapur, the Pandavas lose their kingdom and their wife Draupadi to Duryodhana in a rigged game of dice . Draupadi is the daughter of King Draupada and was given by him to Arjuna. When the five Pandavas returned home to Kunti with her from Draupada's court, she said without looking up that her sons should share everything they had brought with them, making Draupadi the wife of all Pandavas. The Pandavas receive Draupadi back from the Kauravas, but are banished from Hastinapur for thirteen years.
At the end of the thirteen years, the Pandavas claim their kingdom back, but Duryodhana refuses to give up his power and Krishna's attempts to mediate are unsuccessful. The two families begin their allies to rally and prepare for battle. Kunti's eldest son Karna, whom she abandoned as an infant, was found and raised by Dhritarashtra's charioteer Adhiratha and his wife Radha . Later he became king of Anga and as this is an ally of the Kauravas. When the fight seems inevitable, Kunti asks him to fight on the side of his biological siblings, which the latter refuses, referring to his friendship with Duryodhana. However, he promises her to spare his brothers - except for Arjuna. After Bhishma and Drona, who were killed in the battle, Karna becomes the army commander of the Kauravas on the 15th and 16th days of the battle. Now they meet in battle and Arjuna kills Karna.
After the battle, the Pandavas meet their mother Kunti again for the first time in fourteen years. When her sons take power, Kunti retreats into the woods with her brothers-in-law Dhritarashtra and Vidura and Dhritarashtra's wife Gandhari, where she is killed in a forest fire.
literature
- AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada : The teachings of Queen Kunti . The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1991, ISBN 91-7149-040-X
- Brajasundari Devi Dasi: Kunti: An Epic Character of Mahabharat . Touchstone Media, 2003, ISBN 81-87897-10-4
- Arti Dhand: The Subversive Nature of Virtue in the Mahābhārata: A Tale about Women, Smelly Ascetics, and God . In: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72.1. Oxford University Press 2004, pp. 33-58 .
- Wendy Doniger : Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in ancient Greece and India . University of Chicago Press, 1999, ISBN 0-226-15641-9
- Pradip Bhattacharya: Pancha Kanya. The Five Virgins of Indian Epics. A Quest in Search of Meaning . Writer's Workshop, Kolkata 2005.
- Uma Narain: Resurrecting the Mother in Mata Hidimba . In: Economic and Political Weekly 38, 17. Mumbai 2003, pp. 1680–1683 .
- MA Mehendale: Kunti's Relation with Durvasas . In: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 39. Poona 2008, pp. 129-132.
- Kunti 1) . In: John Dowson : A classical dictionary of Hindu mythology and religion, geography, history, and literature. Trübner & co., London 1879, p. 171 ( Text Archive - Internet Archive ).
Web links
- Mahabharata on the Internet Sacred Text Archive (English, Sanskrit)
- Kunti in the Indian zone
- Family tree (PDF; 69 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ kuntī . In: Monier Monier-Williams : Sanskrit-English Dictionary . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1899, p 291, Sp. 1 - 291, column 2. .
