The Kuru dynasty of Hastinapura is the family at the centre of the Mahabharata, and its tree is less a genealogy than a case file on how one broken promise becomes a war. King Shantanu married the river goddess Ganga on the condition that he never question her; when he did, she left, taking the marriage with her and leaving one surviving son, her eighth, Devavrata, who would become Bhishma. When the fisher chief demanded that Satyavati's sons inherit, Shantanu withdrew from the match, and Devavrata independently renounced the succession and vowed celibacy to enable it. Every fracture that follows runs back to that renunciation.
Satyavati's sons by Shantanu failed the line: Chitrangada died young in battle, and the frail Vichitravirya died childless after Bhishma abducted the Kashi princesses Ambika and Ambalika as his brides. Their rejected eldest sister Amba vowed revenge, won Shiva's boon through austerities, and was reborn as Shikhandi to cause Bhishma's death. Into the vacuum Satyavati summoned Vyasa, her son by the sage Parashara, who fathered Dhritarashtra on Ambika, Pandu on Ambalika and Vidura on Ambika's unnamed maid. Blindness barred Dhritarashtra, low birth barred Vidura, and so Pandu took the throne.
The next generation splits along that grievance. Gandhari bore Dhritarashtra one hundred sons — Duryodhana, Dushasana, the dissenting Vikarna — and the daughter Dushala, married to Jayadratha; Yuyutsu, Dhritarashtra's son by another woman, defected. They stand against Pandu's five: Yudhishthira, Bhima and Arjuna borne by Kunti through divine invocation, Nakula and Sahadeva by Madri. Kunti's earlier son Karna, fathered by Surya, abandoned on the river and raised by the charioteer Adhiratha and his wife Radha, fights for Duryodhana and dies at his unknowing brother Arjuna's hand. Draupadi, Drupada's daughter and Dhrishtadyumna's fire-born sister, becomes wife to all five Pandavas by Kunti's careless word, and her humiliation in the Kaurava hall becomes the war's engine.
The version this tree follows is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vyasa himself — a composer who is also a character inside his own family's ruin — while its principal embedded narration is delivered by Vaishampayana to Janamejaya and retold by Ugrashravas. Compiled between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, it contains the Bhagavad Gita, spoken by Krishna to Arjuna when he cannot raise a bow against his kin. By the end nearly everyone here is dead: Abhimanyu at sixteen, Ghatotkacha for his father Bhima, Draupadi's five sons, Gandhari's hundred. The line survives in one child, Parikshit, born to the widowed Uttara after the annihilation.
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