अरुन्धती Arundhatī

Wife of the rishi Vasiṣṭha (= Mizar, ζ UMa), shown to the bride as the model of conjugal fidelity; the pan-Indian tradition of arundhatī-darśana fixes the identification with Alcor securely.

BS 13.6 states that the chaste Arundhatī closely attends Vasiṣṭha, best of sages — exactly the naked-eye companion Alcor beside Mizar; the pair is the classic Indian eyesight test. Kern's variant of BS 13.4 (recorded in the e-text apparatus as क्. प्रागुत्तरतश्च एते सदा उदयन्ते ससाध्वीकाः) says the rishis rise in the north-east 'accompanied by the sādhvī', i.e. Arundhatī, which Iyer's v. 4 translates. Note: Utpala's tradition (Iyer p. 81 n.) holds the visible star is not the 'real' Arundhatī, said to be a sūkṣma-tārā (minute star) very close to Vasiṣṭha.

No Sanskrit text: al-Bīrūnī wrote in Arabic, and the passage survives here only in Sachau's English.

A DECISIVE INDEPENDENT CROSS-CHECK. Al-Bīrūnī equates Arundhatī with al-Suhā and pins it by Ptolemaic catalogue number: 'a pious woman, Al-suhā (Ursa Major, star 80 by [Ptolemy])'. Al-Suhā is the standard Arabic name for Alcor and 80 UMa is Alcor's designation — so an eleventh-century Central Asian observer independently arrives at the identification on file, without recourse to the Indian coordinate tradition.

Transcribed from the Devanagari OCR of the printed edition at shloka_source_url (Achyuta Nand Jha ed., vol. 1) and checked word-for-word against two further independent scans of two different printed editions of the same commentary — Krishna Chandra Dvivedi's (https://archive.org/download/brihatsamhitawithbhattotpalavivrittipartidr.krishnachandradvivedi/Brihat%20Samhita%20%20with%20Bhattotpala%20Vivritti%20Part%20I%20-%20Dr.%20Krishna%20Chandra%20Dvivedi_djvu.txt) and A.V. Tripathi's (https://archive.org/download/JiUm_brihat-samhita-part-1-of-varaha-mihira-by-avadh-bihari-tripathi-saraswati-bhavan-granthamala/Brihat%20Samhita%20Part%201%20of%20Varaha%20Mihira%20by%20Avadh%20Bihari%20Tripathi%20-%20Saraswati%20Bhavan%20Granthamala_djvu.txt). Only glyph-level OCR artifacts that all three scans show to be artifacts (e.g. OCR रद्वव for रद्गव, श्व for श्च) have been normalised; every substantive reading is as scanned, and the two places where the scans genuinely differ are flagged in identification_notes. Both scans print कश्यपः (not काश्यपः) at this point.

Utpala's ch. 13 carries Arundhatī back behind Varāhamihira to KĀŚYAPA, whose verse he quotes on BS 13.4: the Seven Ṛṣis dwell a hundred years in each asterism 'sasādhvīkāḥ' — 'together with their virtuous wife'. Utpala's own gloss makes the referent explicit: 'sasādhvīkāḥ sārundhatikāḥ'. He also preserves a VARIANT READING of BS 13.4 itself — 'prāg-uttarataś caite sadodayante sasādhvīkāḥ', 'and these rise always in the north-east together with their virtuous wife' — which he says 'some read' (kecit … paṭhanti) in place of the transmitted text; he glosses prāg-uttarataḥ as aiśānyāṃ diśi, the north-east. The variant is not in the GRETIL text of the mūla and is worth recording as an early alternative. The identification (Alcor beside Mizar = Vasiṣṭha) is unchanged and rests on BS 13.6, already in the database. Note also the caveat already recorded there from Iyer's footnote citing Utpala: the śāstras hold the visible companion is not the 'real' Arundhatī, which is a sūkṣma-tārā.

Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE (archive.org scan leaf n222 = printed p. 120) because the archive.org OCR of this volume is unusable for Devanagari; the page image itself was fetched in this session at https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.292705/page/n222.jpg . Every numeral was re-read at full scan resolution. Cross-checked against a second, independent scan of the same Ray edition at https://archive.org/download/siddhantadarpanachandrashekarsimha1897_252_Z/ , which agrees character for character on the figures. Round brackets and the figures in them are the PRINTED EDITION'S own: (n) is the serial number of the asterism/star, the figure after it the edition's decoding of the preceding bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numeral, so no numeral has been silently converted here. A handful of the compound word-forms in this worn 1899 type are uncertain and are marked in this database as read, not emended; the FIGURES, which carry the astronomy, were verified at high magnification in both scans.

★ A MEASURED SEPARATION FOR ARUNDHATĪ — apparently the only one in Sanskrit. XII.43 places her with Vasiṣṭha (ζ Ursae Majoris = Mizar), and XII.48 says she stands to the EAST of her lord at an interval of SEVEN MINUTES of arc, being extremely close to Vasiṣṭha. The true Mizar–Alcor separation is 11.8', with Alcor to the east-north-east, so Sāmanta's 7' is of the right order and the right direction for a naked-eye estimate with the wooden instruments he built himself. This is an observational confirmation of Arundhatī = Alcor, independent of al-Bīrūnī's identification by Ptolemaic catalogue number already in this database. The last pāda of the verse, which appears to refer to seeing her with an instrument, is not fully legible in this print and is left untranslated.

CE lines 06,002.031a/031c. This verse is the epic's only unambiguous star-Arundhatī. The Udyoga parallel is 05,109.012a: 'atra te ṛṣayaḥ sapta devī cārundhatī tathā'.

SAGE-VS-STAR DISCRIMINATION: Arundhatī occurs 40× in the Mahābhārata and 3× in the Rāmāyaṇa, and in almost every case she is Vasiṣṭha's wife, a person. Exactly ONE occurrence is unambiguously celestial, and it is the Bhīṣma-Parva omen at 6.2.31: she is 'famed in the three worlds', she is paired with Vasiṣṭha, and the marvel reported is a change in their RELATIVE POSITION — she has put Vasiṣṭha behind her (pṛṣṭhataḥ kṛtaḥ) — which is only meaningful of the Alcor/Mizar pair, and stands in a list of purely astronomical portents (Saturn on Rohiṇī, the moon's mark displaced) with no narrative context. Ganguli reads it the same way and glosses '(constellation) Arundhati'. A second, weaker celestial context is Udyoga 5.109.12, where 'the seven ṛṣis and the goddess Arundhatī' are located in the northern quarter alongside Svāti and the revolving luminaries. IMPORTANT NEGATIVES: the Śalya-Parva passage (9.47.28-49) that the research brief flagged is the Badarapācana-tīrtha legend — Arundhatī stays behind on the Himālaya during a twelve-year drought and is rewarded by Śiva; it is wholly terrestrial and gives no position. Likewise Anuśāsana 13.94-96 (the Vṛṣādarbhi/famine story) is terrestrial, though 13.95.39 supplies the standing folk-etymology of the name: 'know me as Arundhatī because I follow (anurundhatī) my husband's mind'. The 80 UMa identification comes from the Bṛhat Saṃhitā entry, not from the epic.

Devanagari from the Nirnayasagara text on Sanskrit Wikisource. NOTE a substantive variant in 6.5: this witness reads व्योमगङ्गाप्रवाहेषु (vyomagaṅgā-pravāheṣu) where the GRETIL e-text reads ākāśagaṅgāsrotassu - two different Milky-Way names in the same slot.

The discrimination the brief asks for. In Kumarasambhava 6.11, 6.13 and 6.91 Arundhati acts as a PERSON: she sits among the sages, she is addressed, she takes Parvati on her lap. But at 6.3-6.4, where she first appears, the frame is explicitly stellar: Siva 'called to mind the seven rsis MADE OF LIGHT' (ṛṣīñ jyotirmayān sapta) and they appear 'LIGHTING UP THE SKY WITH THEIR HALOES OF RADIANCE' (prabhāmaṇḍalair vyoma dyotayantaḥ), 'together with Arundhati' (sārundhatīkāḥ), having bathed in the streams of the sky-Ganga. So Kalidasa's Seven Sages here are the seven stars and Arundhati is the star that accompanies them - the same relation Alcor has to Mizar. Marked 'likely' because Kalidasa names no individual sage-star and says nothing of her faintness.

Clause excerpted verbatim from the GRETIL prose e-text.

In a chain of similes for a virtuous queen: 'like Arundhati of the great sage, whose station at his side is unrelinquished DAY AND NIGHT' (divā-niśam a-mukta-pārśva-sthitiḥ). 'Day and night' is the phrase that makes this worth recording - it is the language one uses of a circumpolar star that never sets, and Alcor never leaves Mizar's side. But Bana is describing wifely fidelity and the simile works equally well of the woman, so the star-sense is not demonstrable; marked DISPUTED. Bana's other Arundhati, 'the bark of its trees had been washed by Arundhati' in the Ganga description of ch. I, is the sage's wife bathing.