Baka-vadha Parva

The Baka-vadha Parva is the tenth sub-book of the Adi Parva, continuing directly from the Hidimba-vadha Parva's account of the Pandavas' forest wanderings after their escape from the burning house at Varanavata. Still traveling in disguise as wandering brahmins, still believed dead by the kingdom they left behind, Yudhishthira, his brothers, and Kunti come in this sub-book to the town of Ekachakra, where they take shelter with a poor brahmin household and encounter the second great test of Bhima's strength in the forest exile, the killing of the rakshasa Baka.

The sub-book opens with the family settling quietly into life in Ekachakra, maintaining their disguise by begging alms as itinerant brahmins during the day while Kunti manages the household's modest resources at night, careful throughout not to reveal their royal identity or draw attention that might reach Hastinapura. Their peaceful concealment is disturbed one evening when Kunti overhears the family sheltering them in deep and desperate grief, and on inquiring learns the cause: the town lives under an arrangement with a monstrous rakshasa named Baka, who terrorizes the surrounding countryside, and who has been placated for years by an agreement that each household in turn will send him a cartload of food together with the man who drives it, to be consumed in place of the rakshasa ravaging the town at large. The turn to provide this tribute has now fallen upon their hosts, and the family debates in anguish which of its own members must be sacrificed, since none can bear to send any other.

Kunti, moved by their distress and confident in her sons' hidden strength, offers Bhima in the household's place, over Yudhishthira's initial hesitation and the family's own reluctance to accept a stranger's sacrifice in place of their own. She reassures Yudhishthira privately that Bhima's power is more than sufficient for the task, recalling his earlier victory over Hidimba, and the substitution is arranged without revealing to the townspeople who the disguised strangers really are.

Bhima then drives the cart of food out to the rakshasa's dwelling place himself, and rather than deliver the offering intact, eats a substantial portion of it along the way, calling out to Baka as he approaches and provoking him with taunts when the enraged demon appears to find his tribute half-consumed and his intended victim unafraid. Baka, roused to fury, attacks Bhima directly, and the two engage in a prolonged and violent struggle, uprooting trees to use as weapons much as Bhima had done against Hidimba, until Bhima at last overpowers the rakshasa, breaking his back across his knee and killing him. He then carries the body back to the town gate and leaves it there as proof that the threat has ended, before returning quietly to the household as though nothing unusual had occurred.

The people of Ekachakra, discovering Baka's corpse the next morning, are astonished and relieved beyond measure, and though rumor and speculation about the killer's identity spread through the town, the disguised Pandavas allow their hosts alone to guess the truth while keeping their own secret from the wider populace, continuing to live quietly in the town for a further period before circumstances move them onward. It is during this remaining time in Ekachakra, or shortly after, that news reaches them, through a wandering brahmin who has himself just come from Panchala, of King Drupada's intention to hold a svayamvara for his daughter Draupadi, a ceremony of such renown that it draws the interest of every eligible prince and warrior in the region, the disguised Pandavas among them.

Within the larger architecture of the epic, the Baka-vadha Parva functions much as the Hidimba-vadha Parva before it, demonstrating that the Pandavas, though stripped of kingdom, recognition, and public identity, retain both their extraordinary capability and their commitment to protecting those weaker than themselves even while hiding from their own enemies. Bhima's willingness to risk himself for strangers who have merely given them shelter, and Kunti's calm confidence in offering her son for that purpose, reinforce a portrait of the family's character that the epic will return to often, a household whose righteousness persists even when its outward fortunes are at their lowest.

The sub-book's chief thematic contribution, together with its immediate predecessor, is to show heroism exercised anonymously, without any of the glory, recognition, or reward that will follow the Pandavas once their identity becomes known again, and to set up, through the chance news of Draupadi's svayamvara, the next major turn in their fortunes, the public reappearance that the Chaitraratha and Draupadi-svayamvara sub-books will soon narrate, in which the same strength shown here in secret against a forest demon will be displayed openly before an assembly of kings.