Mother of three Pandavas and, before any of them, of the son she set adrift on a river and had to watch her other children fight.
Appears in
The birth of the Kuru princes — A blind heir, a pale one and a renunciant's vow leave the succession contested before any of the cousins can walk.
The house of lac — A guest house built to burn: the first attempt on the Pandavas' lives, and the escape that lets them be thought dead.
Draupadi's svayamvara — An archery test won by a supposed dead man in disguise, and a mother's careless word that binds five brothers to one wife.
Embodies
Birth and worth — Whether a man is measured by the womb he came from or the skill he can prove, argued in the epic by throwing the word suta-putra at him
The binding vow — A promise that outlives the reason it was made for, and the ruin its keeping costs everyone around it.
Questions to explore
Kunti tells her sons to share what they have brought without looking at it — does the epic treat that as binding because she is a mother, or because a word once given cannot be withdrawn?
How long does Kunti carry the knowledge of who Karna is, and what does the text say she does with it?
