In one of the more moving stories in the Mahabharata, we learn that Abhimanyu—the warrior son of Subhadra and Arjuna, and Krishna’s nephew—was in his mother’s womb when he first heard his uncle (in some versions, his father), tell Subhadra about the secret of the impenetrable military formation known as the Chakravyuha. At some point, she dozed off while listening to the story, and so while her unborn child learnt the secret of how to enter the Chakravyuha, he didn’t know how to come out of it. Several years later, this would play out tragically in the Kurukshetra war, as young Abhimanyu, having committed that secret to memory, braves his way inside the dreaded Chakravyuha and fights with all his might, but dies while trying to get out.

For practitioners of garbh sanskar, an ancient Vedic science that encourages women to adopt a positive lifestyle before and during pregnancy, this is one of the earliest illustrations of why the womb plays such a vital | role in the development and growth of a child.