Balarama

The Bhandira Banyan

Balarama’s own story in the Bhagavatam comes in chapter 18 of the tenth skandha, in a Vrindavan summer that someone seems to have caught and held still. The cows move in front, the cowherd boys come behind, and in the middle, playing his flute at his elder brother’s side, walks Krishna. On one such day a new face joins the ring, a staff in his hand, a blanket over his shoulder, the same easy carelessness in his walk, and in the middle of a game nobody stops to ask whose son you are. He is Pralamba, an asura, come to wait inside the game for his moment and carry both brothers off. Krishna knows him the instant he looks at him and takes the offered friendship as if it were real. “My dear friends,” he says, “today let us divide ourselves fairly into two sides, and then play till we have had our fill.” The rule is set: the losing side will carry the winners on their backs to the great banyan the whole district knows by name, Bhandira. Once, Balarama’s side wins, and to Pralamba’s share falls Balarama, the son of Rohini. He had meant to carry off Krishna, and turned to the quiet brother, reckoning him the lighter load. He takes the fair boy up onto his back and runs, and the banyan drops away behind him, and he does not stop at it.

For a while Balarama rides easy, taken up in the pleasure of the game, and then a second thing begins. The weight on the demon’s back starts to grow, until it lies on him like Mount Meru and he cannot move that fair boy forward by a single pace; beaten, he lets his true shape come back, a black demon touching the sky, and with Balarama held aloft on his shoulders he looks like a storm cloud shot through with lightning, carrying the moon. He flies higher, along the road of the sky. The Bhagavatam says that Balarama feels afraid, a little, for the space of one breath. The fear does not outlast the moment. In the very next instant the knowledge of his own nature comes back to him, what he has always been under the shape of a cowherd’s boy, Ananta, the endless one, the serpent on whose thousand hoods the worlds are set down. Then he grows angry. As Indra once brought his thunderbolt down on a mountain, Balarama closes his fist and drives it down on the asura’s head in a single blow. “One fist.” “That was the whole of it.” The head bursts apart, and the demon falls dead to the earth. The boys on the ground, whose breath had stopped in them, watch him step off the body unhurt. “Sadhu.” “Sadhu.” “Well done, well done.” They run and throw their arms around him, and above them the gods let a rain of flowers fall. That day Vrindavan learns that the brother who always walks behind, who keeps the beat behind the flute, carries in his one arm the same strength by which mountains were brought down in the old days.

The Vishnu Parva of the Harivamsha tells these same days in its own order, and there Dhenuka comes before Pralamba. North of Govardhana stands a grove of tall dark palms heavy with ripe fruit, and it lies as empty as a desert, because it belongs to a demon named Dhenuka, who lives there in the shape of a donkey at the center of a herd of his own kind. One day the smell of the ripe fruit carries across to the brothers on the wind, and it is Krishna who speaks first; fruit with a fragrance like that, he tells his brother, must taste the way amrita tastes. “Balarama laughed, and the laugh was the whole plan.” He shakes the trunks the way a storm shakes saplings, and when Dhenuka comes at a gallop and drives both hind hooves into his chest, “Balarama did not stagger.” He catches the hind legs out of the air, swings the whole braying weight in a circle above his head, and hurls it into the crown of the tallest palm, and then the rest of the herd the same way. That day, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the cowherds eat the sweet fruit of that grove with nothing to fear. Then the Bhandira tree, and Pralamba, who in this telling loses a leaping contest to Balarama, lifts him onto his shoulders as the rule demands, and turns away from the tree, letting his true size come as he walks. The Harivamsha’s Balarama calls down to his brother from that enormous back, and even now there is more question than fear in his voice: this thing bearing him away is huge as a mountain and cased in mail; tell me how I bring it down. Krishna answers lightly, smiling. “You are only playing at being a man.” “You are Sesha, the ancient one, the pillar on which the earth and all her creatures stand.” “Make a fist as hard as a thunderbolt and bring it down on this demon’s head.” The fist comes down, Pralamba topples full length, and an unseen voice speaks out of the open air: this demon, whom the gods themselves could not master, has been brought down by a boy who never tires. “They called him Baladeva, the god of strength, and the worlds have called him Baladeva ever since.”

The Arena at Mathura

In the Bhagavatam, Akrura finds the two brothers at the milking ground among the cows in the last light. “The dark one, Shri Krishna, wore yellow silk; the fair one, Balarama, wore blue.” On the road to Mathura, when Akrura goes down into the Yamuna to bathe, he sees the same two boys seated in the water, Shri Hari upon Shesha, and Sankarshana. Chapter 44 opens the arena. At the gate stands the war elephant Kuvalayapida, and when Krishna has wrenched the tusks from its skull, “One tusk went up on Krishna’s shoulder and one on Balarama’s, and they walked into the arena as they were, spattered with blood and ichor.” Inside wait Chanura, Mushtika, Kuta, Shala, and Toshala. “Mushtika had opened against Balarama with his fist.” “Balarama replied with a single blow of his open palm, and the champion shook the way a tree shakes when a storm tears at its roots, then dropped, vomiting blood, and lay still.” Kuta comes next, and Balarama puts him down with his left fist, almost carelessly. When Kamsa is dead, his eight younger brothers come burning to avenge him, and “Balarama met them with an iron bar and put them down one after another, the way a lion moves through cattle.”

The Harivamsha’s slaying of Kamsa tells these events with details of its own. There Kamsa sends for Chanura and Mushtika in the night and asks them to throw to the earth the two forest-ranging cowherd boys, Krishna and Sankarshana; in the arena Kamsa sends three wrestlers the size of mountains against Balarama, Andhra, Nikriti, and Mushtika, and after a long fight Baladeva brings down “a fist like a thunderbolt out of a cloud”; and when Kamsa has fallen, “Baladeva caught Kamsa’s proud brother Urgita in his two hands and killed him.” The Harivamsha is also the text that puts the plow into Balarama’s hands. When Jarasandha rings Mathura with the armies of all his kings, four weapons of Vishnu descend for the two Yadavas, and “Balarama, the handsome first of the Satvatas, reached out first with his right hand and took the plow, dressed in heavenly garlands, which rose like a banner and moved obliquely like a serpent, and the mace Saunanda, which breaks the spirit of an enemy.” When he and Jarasandha meet club against club and he lets the club go for the mace that never missed, a sweet voice speaks out of the sky to the bearer of the plow. “Rama, giver of honor, this king of Magadha is not to be killed by you.” “Baladeva did not strike him.” Later, on the summit of Gomanta, the smell of wine comes to him from the hollow of a flowering kadamba, where the rain has turned to liquor, and the liquor is the goddess Varuni herself; he drinks until he is drunk, and in that same drunkenness, in his blue robe, he leaps from the summit into the midst of the kings like the moon coming down from Sumeru. When Dwarka is built, with Keshava’s consent, Baladeva wins Revati, the daughter of Revata, for his wife.

The Syamantaka

The Vishnu Purana shows Balarama at the one moment when a jewel comes between the brothers. Shatadhanva has killed Satrajit and taken the Syamantaka, and Krishna takes Baladeva aside: the jewel belongs to the two of them by equal right, so mount the chariot. In the forest country of Mithila Krishna cuts off the fugitive’s head with the chakra, searches the body and the clothes, and finds no jewel. “We killed Shatadhanva for nothing.” “Baladeva heard this and heard a story being invented to hide a jewel.” His anger comes out whole: Krishna is greedy for wealth, and forgiven only because he is a brother, and Baladeva wants nothing more to do with Dwarka or with him. He goes to the city of Videha, where King Janaka comes out to him with the arghya and keeps him in his own house, and “For as long as Baladeva lived under Janaka’s roof, Duryodhana, Dhritarashtra‘s son, came and learned the fight with the mace from him.” Three years pass before Babhru, Ugrasena, and the other Yadavas go to Videha, swear to him on oath that Krishna never took the jewel, and bring him home. And when Akrura at last brings the Syamantaka out before the whole clan, “Balabhadra looked at it with open desire: his right in it was equal to Achyuta’s.” Krishna’s answer is that the jewel does the kingdom good only on a man of purity and brahmacharya, and that for its sake the noble Balabhadra would have to give up wine and every enjoyment; the Syamantaka stays with Akrura.

The One Who Took No Side

In the Mahabharata Balarama is present at every great assembly, and each time he stands one step apart from Krishna. At the mountain festival on Raivataka, Arjuna takes Subhadra from the road in his chariot, and Balarama, white and tall as a peak of Kailasa, garlanded, in robes of blue, proud and drunk, silences the arming clans. “You fools, what are you doing, while Krishna sits there and says nothing?” Then he turns on his brother: “Why are you sitting there staring and saying nothing, Krishna?” He swears to empty the earth of Kauravas single-handed, and Krishna reasons him down. In the Udyoga Parva, in Virata’s hall, he praises Krishna’s proposal to send an envoy and then adds his own counsel: let the envoy speak humbly, let Duryodhana be provoked in no way, and let it be remembered that Yudhishthira lost his kingdom by his own choice at dice; Satyaki rises indignant before he has finished. When Duryodhana comes to Dwarka for an army, Balarama reminds him of that hall. “Since I cannot act against Krishna, I have reached this decision: I will fight for neither Kunti’s sons nor you.” He tells him to go and keep the proper rules of war, and Duryodhana embraces him.

He keeps his word. The Shalya Parva says that he sets out on a pilgrimage to the sacred waters of the Sarasvati, taking with him all the Yadavas, their priests, the sacred fire of Dwarka, and gifts of gold and cattle and cloth, moving from Prabhasa, where the river meets the sea, to Kurukshetra, bathing at each ford and giving to the Brahmins at every step; Udapana, Vinashana, where the river goes under the ground, Sapta-Sarasvata, and the ford where the contest of Vasishtha and Vishvamitra once ran with blood. At the edge of Kurukshetra he hears of the slaughter of Shalya, the king of the Madras, and gives way to grief for him. At a ghat of the Yamuna, seated among the sages, he is found by Narada, who tells him the whole terrible tale of the Kurus and bids him come and see the duel between his two students, since Duryodhana has come up out of the lake with his mace. He sends his people home to Dwarka and sings among the Brahmins, “Where is such happiness as in a dwelling by the Sarasvati?” On the field, where Bhima and Duryodhana stand with their maces uplifted, he says, “Two and forty days have passed since I left home.” “I set out under the constellation Pushya and have returned under Sravana.” Both students, maces still in their arms, do honor to their teacher, and in blue robes, fair of complexion, he sits among the kings like the full moon ringed by a thousand stars.

The duel runs long, and then Bhima strikes below the navel. Duryodhana‘s thighs are broken, and the Mahabharata says that Rama grows furious. “Fie on Bhima, fie on Bhima!” “No limb below the navel should be struck, this is the rule in the treatises!” He lifts his plow and rushes at Bhimasena, and Krishna seizes the rushing Rama and holds him in his stout, well-rounded arms. Krishna reminds him of the vow Bhima swore in the assembly, of the curse of the sage Maitreya, and of the age of Kali at hand. The bearer of the plow answers him. “Dharma is well practiced by the good.” But dharma has been afflicted by Bhimasena, and that harmony is broken, Govinda, whatever Krishna may say. He cannot dispel his wrath, yet he grows composed, and he tells the assembly that Duryodhana has completed the sacrifice of battle with the final ablution that is the winning of glory, and that the son of Pandu will be known in the world as a crooked warrior. Then the son of Rohini, like the crest of a white cloud, mounts his chariot and sets out for Dwaravati.

Toward the Sea

Three texts tell Balarama’s end, and in all three he goes first. In the Mausala Parva of the Mahabharata, at Prabhasa, “Balarama began to drink, in front of Krishna, and with him drank Kritavarma, Satyaki and Gada, and Babhru did the same,” and out of that drinking rises the quarrel in which the Yadavas kill one another with clubs that had been blades of eraka grass. When Krishna, Daruka, and Babhru follow the way he has taken, they find him sitting in a lonely part of the forest, set in yoga. “And out of his mouth a great snake was coming, and the snake was white.” “It was a naga with a thousand heads and red eyes, as large as a mountain, and it was leaving the human body it had lived in for so long.” It moves off along the way that leads to the ocean, and the Ocean himself has come to receive him, with the nagas and the sacred rivers. The eleventh skandha of the Bhagavatam tells the same end in its own way in chapter 30. After the slaughter, “Balarama watched all of it end.” Then he goes down to the sea’s edge, fixes his self by yoga in its own true nature, and gives up the human body without a sound, returning to what he has always been, Sankarshana; only then does Krishna walk to a peepal tree and sit down upon the earth. In the Vishnu Purana, Krishna and Daruka see him seated at the root of a tree with a great serpent coming out of his mouth, and the sea comes forward to meet it with arghya, as a host comes to the door for a guest; and that Purana adds that at the burning, “The sati Revati embraced Balarama’s body and entered the blazing fire, and the flames came to her cool, for the joy of his limbs against hers.” In all three Krishna sits down only after his brother has gone.

His Path

Dhenuka and Pralamba · A donkey in a palmyra grove, a laugh that was the whole plan, and the name the gods gave him that same day.

The Story of the Syamantaka · One jewel, one suspicion, and three years in Videha, where Duryodhana came to learn the mace.

The Fords of the Sarasvati · The dry well at Udapana, Vinashana where the river hides herself, and a pilgrim who bathes and gives at every ghat.

The One Who Walks Behind

Three texts hold Balarama in three different postures, and in all three he stands one step off the center of the story. In the Bhagavatam he is the brother who keeps the beat behind the flute, who takes the middle of one story and only one, and even there only after a single breath of fear. The Mahabharata makes him the man who trained both sides and therefore could sit with neither, who turned his back on the war to walk the whole length of a river and came back on the last day to say what he had said while teaching the rules. And the Vishnu Purana sets him in Videha for three years, estranged from his brother over a jewel. Through all of it runs one motion. Where Krishna chooses, Balarama holds to the rule; where Krishna stays, Balarama withdraws; and when the end comes, in all three texts he goes before his brother, and Krishna sits down only after he has gone. The story that opens with a hidden birth closes with a white naga going toward the sea, and between the two lies everything an elder brother can give a younger one: a back to ride on, a plow, and a judgment of his own that differs from his brother’s and never once leaves him.