Anuradha is the seventeenth nakshatra, from 213 degrees 20 minutes to 226 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac within Scorpio. Its Vimshottari ruler is Saturn, its presiding deity is Mitra, god of friendship, contracts, and the honoured compact, and its symbol is a lotus or a staff. The name is glossed as following Radha, the next radiant one. Jyotisha reads Anuradha through Mitra's theme of devotion, friendship across boundaries, and the discipline of keeping faith, the loyal bond that endures under Saturn's steadiness, and classes it as Deva gana. The lotus lends it a note of devotion flowering in difficult ground. These are traditional interpretations of the mansion, laid over the Scorpio stars that Indian astronomy counts at this point.
Anuradha's padas fall in Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. Mitra is paired with Varuna throughout the Rigveda as guardians of cosmic and social order, the two together overseeing oaths and the moral bonds between people, and Mitra's specific office of friendship and alliance, distinct from Varuna's more punitive oversight of transgression, is what gives Anuradha its particular reading of loyal, devoted companionship rather than law enforced by fear. The mansion sits within Scorpio between Vishakha and Jyeshtha, and jyotisha sometimes reads the three consecutive Scorpio-region mansions, focused striving, devoted friendship, and hard-won seniority, as a loose narrative arc across the sign, though this sequential reading is an interpretive convenience rather than a doctrine stated as such in the classical sources.