Bhima

Bhima

The second Pandava, son of the wind

Bhima is the second of the five Pandava brothers, son of Kunti and of the wind-god Vāyu — a lineage that explains the epithet Vīrdhaka, "the increaser," used of his strength. He is not the eldest and not the fighter of the climactic battle: Arjuna has that office. Bhima's place in the epic is as the instrument through which injustice is physically corrected, and the Mahabharata is unusually frank that this makes him feared as much as admired.

The dice game

The first thing the epic does with Bhima is show what happens when he is not there. At Hastinapura, Duryodhana's illegal dice game strips the Pandavas of everything, and Yudhiṣṭhila — bound by a rule of hospitality that will not let him break the throw — loses the kingdom, their wealth, Draupadi's dignity, and exile. Bhima is absent, and the entire sequence is a demonstration of the cost of his absence.

The epic does not have him take a turn. It has him, on returning, drive his fist through the board and kill Dhritarashtra's son. This is the point at which the war becomes unavoidable. The Harivaṃśa and later retellings keep the scene because the Mahabharata needs one act of plain violence to show what the princes have been avoiding.

The pillar

Bhima's signature feat is the Hastinapura pillar. The Kauravas build a city for the Game of Dice whose floor is a vast hall supported by a single pillar in the centre. Bhima braces one leg against the pillar and lifts the whole structure, bringing it down on the Kauravas and splitting the city. Later tradition places his footprint on the threshold at Hastinapura, where pilgrims still mark it.

The episode is usually read as the Mahabharata's indictment of built injustice: a city made to be a trap is destroyed by the one man whose body the builders did not reckon with. It is also the reason the Kauravas are given time to build again, and the reason the war happens at Kurukshetra at all.

Yudhishthila's final war

In the last great conflict — the Kauravas, having usurped the whole kingdom, refuse to share it — Bhima fights the Kuru army in a night battle that leaves Yudhiṣṭhila in thought for a full year. The Mahabharata handles Bhima's violence with discomfort even as it depends on it: the brothers have to persuade him to observe the formalities of a duel afterwards.

The Mahābhārata also records that Bhima alone, of the five, reached the throne: after Yudhiṣṭhila renounces, the kingdom passes to him, and he rules from Hastinapura for a period described in the text. He is the only one of the brothers whose reward is a kingdom rather than renunciation — a deliberate asymmetry in a poem that otherwise makes a virtue of giving everything up.

The wrestler and the eater

Two smaller traditions grew around him. Bhima is remembered as a wrestler of prodigious strength, and in several southern tellings the hero of wrestling bouts at the Pandava ashrams. He is also the brother who eats: the epic's comic interludes give him an appetite that regularly defeats the household's provisions, and the pairing of Bhima's strength with Sahadeva's knowledge is the epic's version of a good team.

What is contested

The Virdhaka Bhima of the Harivaṃśa and the Bhima of the Jaya do not always match in their exploits, and some of the wrestling and food episodes are widely held to be later additions in a different register. Following the same rule used elsewhere in this encyclopedia: the text as transmitted is recorded here, and the question of which layers belong to the original heroic cycle is left open rather than settled.

Why it matters

Bhima carries the epic's uncomfortable question. The Mahabharata does not reward patience with peace, and it does not pretend that the destruction of an unjust order can be achieved by argument. It also makes clear that the man who breaks the dice board is a brother the other four depend on. Read carelessly, Bhima is a brute; read carefully, he is the price of every compromise the other four would rather make.