Parvati is the consort of Shiva, the mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, and one of the principal forms of the Great Goddess in Hinduism. Her name means daughter of the mountain, for she is the child of Himavat, the personified Himalaya, and Mena; she is also understood as the rebirth of Sati, Shiva's first wife, who gave up her body in grief and anger at her father Daksha's insult to her husband. As Parvati she is born again to be Shiva's wife once more, and much of her story concerns how she wins a god who has withdrawn utterly from the world. She is the gentle, domestic and benevolent face of the goddess, often called Gauri, the fair one, and shown at Shiva's side in the life of the divine family.
The definitive literary telling of Parvati's courtship of Shiva is the Kumarasambhava, The Birth of the War-God, a Sanskrit epic by the poet Kalidasa, usually dated to around the fifth century CE and counted among the masterpieces of classical Sanskrit literature; it narrates at length her long ascetic practice in the Himalayan wilderness, undertaken specifically to draw the meditating Shiva's attention after the god of love Kama is burned to ash by Shiva's opened third eye for attempting to disturb his austerities, and it remains, for many later poets and artists across South Asia, the primary literary reference point for the whole episode rather than any single Puranic version alone.