Mangal Dosha

Mangal Dosha, also called Kuja Dosha or Manglik, is a rule from later popular practice about where Mars, known as Mangala or Kuja, stands in a birth chart. It is brought up when charts are compared for a marriage. The Brihat Jataka holds no rule by that name, but the typed Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra has an early form of the idea, described below. The calculator on this site runs no test for it and prints no label.

What the Brihat Jataka says about Mars is mostly general. It makes Mars the strength of the Kalapurusha, the zodiac pictured as a body, and the general among the planets, with Mesha and Vrishchika as its signs, exaltation in Capricorn at the twenty-eighth degree, and the Sun, the Moon and Jupiter as friends. Counted from where it stands, Mars sees the seventh house fully, as every planet does, and also the fourth and eighth, and chapter 26 of the typed Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, edition unidentified, says the same. Iyer's chapter XXIV, on the horoscopy of women, also has a rule about Mars in the seventh house, which this page does not repeat.

Chapter 80 of the typed Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, on the horoscopy of women, says that Mars in the first, fourth, seventh, eighth or twelfth house, with no sight or company of a benefic planet, is a danger to the husband. As we read it, the same chapter says the placement in a man's chart is a danger to his wife, and that the harm is broken when such a bride is married to a man whose chart has the placement. That is a stated condition of a chart, not a test of who may marry. Whether to marry, and whom, is a personal choice that no chart settles, and this site gives no verdict on it.

Popular practice is said to attach remedies to the rule. Chapter 84 of the typed Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, on appeasing the grahas, prescribes worship of graha images, mantras and fire offerings, along with feeding and gifts. Chapter 54, on the periods of Mars, uses the word kuja dosha in a verse that prescribes a Rudra chant and the gift of an ox after a list of troubles of a Mars period. As we read them, neither chapter prescribes a gemstone or mentions marriage, and anyone with a medical, legal or financial concern should ask a qualified person.