Mangal Dosha — also called Kuja Dosha, or being manglik — is the most feared result in marriage matching, and also one of the most loosely defined. It is a rule about where Mars sits in the birth chart, but the rule changes depending on whom you ask.
The basic rule
A chart has Mangal Dosha when Mars occupies the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 8th or 12th house. Those houses are read for the self, family, home, spouse, longevity and the pleasures of the bed respectively, and Mars there is held to disturb them.
Some lists leave out the 2nd house and use only five. This site includes it, following the six-house list.
Counted from where?
The bigger disagreement is over the starting point:
- From the lagna (ascendant) only — the usual north Indian practice.
- From the lagna, the Moon and Venus — the more cautious south Indian practice, which checks all three.
This site reports all three. A chart is marked manglik when Mars falls in one of the six houses counted from the lagna or the Moon. The severity — mild, moderate or strong — is the number of the three reference points (lagna, Moon, Venus) from which the rule is met.
Why so many charts qualify
Six of the twelve houses count, so from any single reference point Mars meets the rule in about half of all charts. Checking from two or three reference points pushes the share higher still. Being manglik is therefore not rare or unusual — it is roughly as common as not being manglik, which is worth knowing before treating it as a verdict.
The mutual-cancellation rule
The most widely accepted exception is simple: if both partners are manglik, the dosha is treated as cancelled. The site’s matching tool applies this and says so. When only one partner is manglik, it reports which one and the severity.
Manuals also give many further exceptions — based on the sign Mars occupies, aspects from benefics, the partner’s chart and more. They vary a great deal from one authority to the next, and this site does not apply them.
Mangal Dosha is a matching convention, mostly elaborated in later manuals rather than set out at length in the older classics. It is not part of the 36-point Guna Milan score, and it is a traditional belief, not a finding about marriages.