Introduction
Vinata is a wife of the sage Kashyapa and the mother of the bird Garuda and the charioteer Aruna. She is best known for her rivalry with her sister and co-wife Kadru, and for her son Garuda who freed her from bondage.
Family
Origin
Vinata and Kadru were both daughters of the Prajapati Daksha, and both were married to Kashyapa. When Kashyapa offered them a boon, Kadru asked for a thousand powerful serpent sons, and Vinata asked for two sons more powerful than Kadru's thousand.
The eggs
Kadru laid a thousand eggs, and Vinata two. The eggs were kept in warm vessels for five hundred years. Kadru's sons hatched, but Vinata's eggs did not. Growing impatient, Vinata broke one egg, and found a son, only half formed, with a body incomplete below the waist. He was Aruna. Angry at the untimely opening, Aruna cursed his mother to serve her rival for five hundred years, until the second egg hatched. After this, he went to the sky and became the charioteer of the sun god Surya, and his light is the dawn.
The wager and servitude
The two sisters saw the celestial horse Uchchaihshravas, which had come from the churning of the ocean. They argued about the colour of its tail, and Vinata said it was white and Kadru said black, with the loser to become the other's slave. Kadru told her sons, the serpents, to hang on the horse's tail to darken it. Some refused, and she cursed them to be destroyed in a great snake sacrifice. Others did as she asked, and Vinata lost the wager and became Kadru's servant.
Freed by Garuda
When the second egg hatched, after five hundred years, Garuda was born. Learning that his mother was a servant, he asked the serpents what they would accept for her freedom. They asked for the nectar of immortality. Garuda flew to heaven, defeated the gods, and brought the nectar, and Vinata was freed.
Meaning
The story is a parable about impatience and its consequences, and about the conflict between kinds of beings, birds and serpents, as told in the Mahabharata's Astika Parva.