With the serpent king gone from the Yamuna and the river running clean again, the two brothers pushed their grazing farther out. Their cattle carried them toward Mount Govardhana, into wide green country thick with good grass, the kind of country a herdsman dreams about. Not every wood along the way was safe. Kamsa, the usurper on the throne of Mathura who had been promised his death at the hands of Devaki’s son, had loosed his creatures across the land with a single command, to seek out and destroy anyone who stood with the gods against him, and some of those creatures had claimed forests for their own and squatted in them, waiting for these two boys to wander in.
One such wood stood north of Govardhana, along the bank of the Yamuna: a grove of palms so tall and dark that their fruited, drooping crowns looked from a distance like a line of elephants raising their trunks. The ground beneath them was everything a herdsman could want, cool and level, black-earthed, free of stones, deep in grass, and ripe, sweet fruit weighed down the palm crowns overhead. No one went in. For all its riches the grove lay as empty as a desert, because it belonged to a demon named Dhenuka, who lived there in the shape of a donkey at the center of a whole herd of his own kind, and anyone who came near the fruit, man or beast or bird, he kicked to death. The cowherds could only stand at the edge of the trees, look at that fruit, and swallow their longing.
In the palmyra grove
One day the smell of the ripe fruit carried across to the brothers on the wind, and it was Krishna who spoke first. Smell that, he said to Balarama; fruit with a fragrance like that must taste the way amrita tastes. Let us go in and take it, and take it now. Balarama laughed, and the laugh was the whole plan. He walked into the grove, set his hands to the palm trunks, and shook them the way a storm shakes saplings, until the ripe fruit came down around him in a heavy, drumming rain.
The sound reached Dhenuka and lit his fury like a dropped torch in dry grass. Fruit was falling in his kingdom, and nothing fed in his kingdom uninvited. He shook out his mane, threw up his tail, tore at the ground with a hoof, and came on at a gallop with his eyes fixed and his lips drawn back from his teeth, tracking the noise of the falling fruit until he found Balarama standing under a palm like a flag planted in conquered ground. He bit him first, a sudden slash of teeth, then spun on his forelegs and drove both hind hooves into Balarama’s chest, the double kick that had killed everything it had ever landed on. Balarama did not stagger. He caught the hind legs out of the air in his two hands, swung the whole braying weight of the demon in a circle above his head, and hurled him straight up into the crown of the tallest palm. Dhenuka came down through his own tree with his thighs and waist and neck and spine shattered, and lay dead among the fruit he had guarded from every living thing and never once shared.
The rest of the herd charged, kin of the dead demon wearing the same borrowed shape, and Balarama took them the same way, one after another, catching each and flinging it up into the treetops until the whole herd had rained back down around him. When it was over, the floor of the grove lay strewn with palm fruit and the bodies of the beasts together, and it looked like an autumn sky packed with cloud. The grove stood open and clean again, and it seemed to breathe out. The cattle wandered in and grazed without fear, the herdsmen followed them in with the dread gone out of their shoulders, and the two brothers, broad and easy as young bull elephants, spread out seats of grass and sat down at their ease in the shade they had cleared. That day, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the cowherds ate the sweet fruit of that grove with nothing left to fear under those trees.
A rakshasa hidden in a game
When the grove was quiet the brothers moved on and came to the great Bhandira tree, a fig so vast that its branches shaded a full yojana of ground and stood up against the sky like a dark cloud anchored to the earth, roof enough against sun and rain for a whole company of boys and their herds, and they made it the center of their play. They ranged the forest paths with the other cowherd boys, ropes coiled over their shoulders, garlands of wild flowers across their chests, ear ornaments twisted from grass-tips and blossoms, calling their cows and calves by name, the fair Balarama and the dark Krishna moving among the trees like a white cloud and a black cloud traveling under a single rainbow. At the Bhandira tree they wrestled, threw stones, and matched themselves at every contest boys can invent.
Into that easy company came Pralamba, a demon of the first rank among the danavas, and he had come to kill. He put on the body of a cowherd boy, hung himself with wild flowers like all the rest, and slipped into the games with an easy smile, laughing when they laughed, running when they ran, until the others took him for one more friend from one more herding family. All the while, behind the borrowed face, he was measuring the two brothers for weak points. He studied Krishna, and something in the dark boy made him look away. So he gave up on him, and settled on Balarama.
Krishna called a new game that day, a leaping contest, the boys paired off two by two, and the rule was simple and as old as boyhood: whoever lost carried the winner on his shoulders back to the foot of the Bhandira tree. Krishna drew a boy named Sridama. Balarama drew Pralamba. When the leaping was done, Krishna’s side had won every pairing; Krishna had beaten Sridama, and Balarama had beaten Pralamba. So the losers bent, grumbling and laughing, to carry the winners home, and it fell to Pralamba to lift Balarama onto his shoulders, which was the one thing he had wanted since the moment he walked into the game.
He took Balarama up and set off, and he turned away from the tree. He walked fast, in the wrong direction, the way a cloud slides off with the moon, and as he walked he let his true size come. The boy’s shape strained and split. He grew. He rose. He began to climb toward the open sky, meaning to carry his rider far past the reach of any help and finish him where no one could even watch it happen.
One blow
For a few steps Balarama let it pass as part of the game. But something had already gone wrong inside the demon’s plan: the boy on his shoulders weighed more than any boy should, more than anything should, and to bear that impossible weight Pralamba was forced to let out his real body. He swelled to the height of the Bhandira tree and past it, a dark mountain of a body with a black shine on it like burnt collyrium, his face and neck monstrous, his eyes as wide as chariot wheels, a five-tiered crown blazing on his head like a second sun. The earth sank under his feet at every stride. Hung with long garlands and wrapped in a vast dark raiment, he looked like Death itself, risen up and given a body, wading away through the trees with the moon of Vraja on his shoulders. Riding that enormous back, Balarama understood at last what was carrying him.
He called down to his brother, and even now there was more question than fear in his voice. Krishna, he said, this thing bearing me away is huge as a mountain and cased in mail; it has thrown up some great illusion and worn a boy’s shape to walk among us, and now its pride has swollen and its power has doubled under me. Tell me how I bring it down.
Krishna knew exactly who his brother was, knew it the way one half of a thing knows the other, and he answered lightly, smiling, because there was nothing on that whole horizon to fear. You are only playing at being a man, he said. Remember what you are. When the worlds dissolve into one dark ocean, they rest on your coils; the gods have searched for your end and never found it, and that is why they call you Ananta, the one without end. You are Sesha, the ancient one, the pillar on which the earth and all her creatures stand. You and I are one strength wearing two bodies to protect this world, and between us we hold up the whole of creation. So why are you waiting like a man who has forgotten his own name? Make a fist as hard as a thunderbolt and bring it down on this demon’s head.
Balarama heard him, and the memory of what he was came back all at once, ages of it, oceans of it. His strength rose and kept rising until it filled the three worlds, and the demon beneath him staggered mid-stride under a weight that had passed all bearing. Balarama closed his hand into a fist hard as a thunderbolt and drove it down onto Pralamba’s head. The blow crushed the skull and rammed it down into the trunk of the body. The life went out of the demon between one step and the next; he dropped to his knees, then toppled full length and lay stretched across the broken ground like a cloud torn loose and flung out of the sky. From the ruin of his head the blood ran off in streams, the way water threaded with bright minerals runs glittering down the flank of a mountain.
Balarama let the great strength sink back out of sight, the way a tide goes out, climbed down from the wreck of the demon, and took Krishna in his arms. Overhead the gods had gathered in the sky to watch, and along with the herdsmen crowding in from every side they sang his victory. An unseen voice spoke out of the open air, plain enough for every ear on that field: this demon, it said, whom the gods themselves could not master, has been brought down by force by a boy who never tires. For that deed the gods gave him a new name then and there. They called him Baladeva, the god of strength, and the worlds have called him Baladeva ever since.
So the brothers ranged and played through the two months of the rains, and when the season turned they came back to Vraja and found the whole settlement busy and glad, deep in merriment, making ready for a great offering. It was the yearly festival of Indra, king of the gods and lord of the clouds, and Krishna, watching the mounting preparations, began to ask what it was all for. A new trial was already gathering over the cowherds, greater than any demon Kamsa had ever sent, and this time it would come down out of the open sky, from the throne of Indra himself.
Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 57 to 59; chapter numbers of the critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story from chapters 68 to 69 of M. N. Dutt’s English translation (1897), which follows the vulgate text, keeping its sequence of events.