Which Planet Is Responsible for What: The Natural Karaka of Each Graha and House

“Which planet is responsible for marriage?” “For a government job?” “For foreign settlement?” In jyotish the honest form of that question is a different one: which graha does the tradition treat as the karaka, the significator, of that area of life, and which house does it read for it? This page answers that from the site’s own planet and house tables, quoting the entry each answer rests on. Where the tables say nothing, the page says so instead of filling the gap.

One boundary first. This page does not map planets to illnesses or to parts of the body, and a question about an illness or a body belongs to a doctor.

What a Karaka Is (कारक)

In jyotish usage a karaka is a significator: the graha that stands for a person or a matter. The natural, or naisargika, karakas are fixed. In the Parashari scheme Venus is the karaka of marriage in every chart ever cast, and the Sun is the karaka of the father in every chart. That fixity is the whole point, and also the limit: a significator tells you which graha to look at, not what is there.

The Jaimini scheme adds a second, movable set, the chara karakas, which the site covers on its chara karaka page. There the roles go to grahas by how far each has travelled through its sign, so the darakaraka, the chara significator of the spouse, is a different graha from chart to chart. The two sets answer different questions and are easy to confuse. The clearest case is the atmakaraka: the site’s planet table calls the Sun “the atmakaraka of the chart” and lists “the soul (atma)” in its karaka line, while the Jaimini atmakaraka is whichever graha stands furthest through its sign.

Which Planet Is Responsible for What: the Lookup

Each row below takes one life area people ask about and gives the graha or grahas the tables name as its karaka, the house or houses they read for it, and the exact entry each answer comes from. Grahas link to their planet pages and houses to their house pages.

A few rows need a word. For career the tables name no graha in a planet’s own line; the karaka comes from the 10th house entry, “Saturn for profession”, and the same entry gives the Sun and Mercury for status. A government job joins two things the tables carry separately: government sits in the Sun’s karaka line and in the 10th house’s significance, and the site’s government job yoga page works through the combinations the tradition reads for it. Business splits the same way: trade and commerce under Mercury, partnerships under the 7th.

For the husband or wife, the tables follow the classical split by the chart’s owner: Jupiter is listed for “the husband in a woman’s chart” and Venus for “the wife in a man’s chart”, and the 7th house karaka line repeats the first. That split is the tradition’s, reported here as it stands. For foreign settlement and foreign travel, Rahu’s line carries foreign lands and foreigners, the 12th house carries foreign residence, and the 9th carries long-distance travel; the site’s foreign travel and settlement page goes further into those houses.

Friends, luck (bhagya), debt and court cases have a house in the tables but no karaka graha. Luck is the 9th, the Bhagya Bhava; debt and court cases (“legal issues”) are the 6th; friends are the 11th. Supplying a graha for any of them would mean reaching past the tables, and this page does not.

What the Tables Do Not Carry

Several searches have no entry at all. No karaka line and no house theme mentions a visa or a job as such, so a job change has no listed significator; a change is an event in time, and this page times nothing. The word fame does not appear either. The nearest entry is the 10th house’s public reputation, which is why that row is labelled the way it is. For late marriage, Saturn’s karaka line does list “delay itself”, but nothing in the tables ties that delay to marriage, and putting the two together is a reading of a chart, which this page does not make.

All Karaka Planets: the Nine Grahas

The full lines for the nine grahas follow, as the site’s planet table gives them. Two columns because the table keeps two: what each graha governs in general, and what it is the karaka of. Ten items are left out here: the ones that touch on the body or on age, and Rahu’s speculation and sudden gain. Each planet’s own page carries its full line.

Karaka Bhava: the Natural Significator of Each House

The second half of the scheme runs the other way: for each of the twelve houses, the Parashari tradition names the graha that signifies that house’s matters. The site’s house table gives the line below for each, with the house’s themes beside it. Two rows are shortened. The 6th and 8th house lines go on to bodily matters, so the 6th is printed up to “conflict” and the 8th to the graha’s name; the health themes of the 1st, 6th and 8th are left out of the themes column for the same reason.

Counting the full lines: Jupiter is named in the karaka line of five houses (2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th), Saturn in four (6th, 8th, 10th and 12th), the Sun and Mercury in three each, Mars in two, and the Moon, Venus and Ketu in one each. Rahu is named in no house’s karaka line, although its own line carries foreign lands. The 1st house is the odd one: its karaka is “Sun, and the Lagna lord itself”, so half of its significator changes with the chart. The 5th names Jupiter as the Putra Karaka.

A Karaka Is Not a House Lord

The karaka of a house is the same in every chart. The lord of a house is not: it is the ruler of whichever sign falls in that house, and that depends on the lagna. The table below works it out for the 7th and 10th houses from each of the twelve lagnas, using the sign rulers in the site’s sign table.

Venus, the karaka the tradition reads for marriage, is also the 7th lord for only two of the twelve lagnas, Aries and Scorpio. Across the twelve, the 7th lord is one of seven different grahas. For a Cancer lagna, for instance, the 7th sign is Capricorn and its lord is Saturn, while the 7th house’s karaka is still Venus. Saturn, the 10th house’s karaka for profession, is the 10th lord only for Aries and Taurus. So “which planet is responsible for my career” already has two different answers before any chart is drawn: the karaka, which is fixed, and the lord, which comes with the lagna. The site’s house lord pages cover the second.

One Significator Is Not a Reading

Knowing that Venus is the karaka of marriage says nothing about anyone’s marriage. Practitioners in the Parashari line read a matter through several factors at once: the house, its lord and where the lord sits, the karaka and its condition, and the running period. The site’s own planet table puts it this way for marriage, that the 7th house, its lord, Venus, the navamsa and the running dasha are read together. A table of karakas is the index to that reading, not the reading. This page reads no chart, forecasts no outcome and dates nothing.

To see where the grahas sit in your own chart, start from the nine planets and the twelve houses. The free kundli gives the lagna, the Moon sign and nakshatra, the Sun sign, the running dasha, and the sign and house of Mars.