Bakasura

The cart creaks out of the town at dawn, loaded with a heap of boiled rice, and two buffaloes walk ahead of it. The driver does not expect to come back. Neither do his neighbours, who have been sending a driver along this road at long intervals for years, and who know exactly what waits at the end of it. A rakshasa called Baka lives in the forest outside Ekachakra, and the rice, the buffaloes and the man are his dinner.

That is how the Mahabharata sets the scene, and its version of the arrangement is more unsettling than plain terror. Baka is not simply a monster in the woods. He is, in the words of the household that tells the story, the lord of the country and the town, and because of his strength no enemy troubles the place. He protects it. The price of his protection is food, a cartload of rice, two buffaloes and the human being who brings them, paid by one household after another in rotation. The turn reaches any one family only after many long years. A family that tries to dodge it is killed, children and wives included, and eaten. The king who should have ended this lives in a city called Vetrakiya and, the same household complains, has neither the wit nor the will to do anything about it.

The Pandavas walk into this by accident. Burned out of the house of lac and hunted by their cousins, the five brothers and their mother Kunti are living in disguise at Ekachakra, lodging with a Brahmin and begging for their food. One day, while the others are out, Kunti hears weeping from the Brahmin’s rooms. The family’s turn has come. The father cannot bring himself to send his wife, his little son or his daughter, he has no money to buy a substitute, and he has decided that they should all go to the rakshasa together and be eaten at once.

Kunti has five sons, and she offers one. The Brahmin refuses outright to let a guest die in his place, and Kunti has to explain that this particular son will come back. She has seen him kill rakshasas of huge bodies before. Her eldest, Yudhishthira, is appalled when he hears of it and accuses her of throwing away the brother on whose arms they all sleep safely. Kunti answers that she knows what Bhima is: when he was a newborn he fell from her lap onto a mountainside, and the rock broke.

Bhima takes the cart. Near the forest he sits down and starts eating the rakshasa’s rice himself, shouting Baka’s name between mouthfuls. As challenges go, it is hard to beat for rudeness, and it works.

Baka comes out of the trees pressing the ground deep with every step, a giant with red eyes, a red beard and red hair, his mouth split from ear to ear, his ears straight as arrows and his forehead furrowed into three lines. He bites his lip and asks what fool is eating his food in front of him and wants to visit the god of death. Bhima smiles and keeps eating with his face turned away. The rakshasa yells, runs at him with both arms raised and brings both fists down on his back. Bhima does not look up. Baka tears up a tree. By the time he is ready to use it, Bhima has finished the whole cartload, washed, and stands up cheerful and ready to fight.

He catches the thrown tree in his left hand. After that they both tear up trees and hurl them at each other until there are no trees left in that part of the forest. Then Baka shouts his own name and grapples. The two drag each other back and forth until the earth shakes and big trees crack apart around them. The rakshasa tires first. Bhima forces him to the ground, plants one knee in the middle of his back, takes his neck in his right hand and the cloth at his waist in his left, and bends him double. Baka roars, vomits blood and dies with a sound that brings his whole family running out of the forest.

Bhima does not kill them. He makes them promise never again to kill human beings, and the epic says that from that day the rakshasas of the district were seen to be peaceful towards people. He drags the body to one of the town’s gates and leaves it there. In the morning the citizens find a corpse the size of a mountain cliff lying in its own blood, and come out in their thousands, wives, old people and children, to stare at it. They work out whose turn it had been and question the Brahmin, who keeps the Pandavas’ secret by crediting a wandering Brahmin learned in mantras. The town founds a festival in his honour.

Baka’s death was not quite the end of the matter. Years later, in the Kamyaka forest, a second rakshasa with a blazing torch blocks the Pandavas’ path at midnight and introduces himself as Kirmira, brother of Baka. He has been searching the earth for Bhima ever since, he says, to avenge his brother and his friend Hidimba, and he means to eat him. Bhima kills him too, in nearly the same way.

The other Bakasura is a different creature entirely, from a different text and a different hero. In the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, Krishna is a small boy minding calves on the banks of the Yamuna. The boys bring their calves to a pool to drink, and when they look up they see beside the water a body like a mountain peak broken off by a thunderbolt. It is Bakasura, a demon in the shape of a baka, the Sanskrit word for a crane or heron, with a very sharp beak. Before anyone can move, he swallows Krishna.

The other boys, Balarama among them, go limp with shock. Inside the bird, the child turns as hot as fire and scorches the root of the demon’s throat, and Bakasura spits him out unharmed. He lunges again with his beak. Krishna seizes the two halves of the beak and tears the demon apart, the text says, as easily as a child splits a blade of grass. Flowers fall from heaven and the boys walk home with the calves, shouting the story to anyone who will listen.

The Bhagavata calls this Bakasura a friend of Kamsa, the tyrant king who sends one assassin after another against the infant Krishna, and makes him brother to two more of them: the demoness Putana, already dead by his hand, and Aghasura, who comes next, swearing to avenge them both. The Puranic Encyclopaedia compiled by Vettam Mani lists the epic’s rakshasa and the Bhagavata’s crane as separate demons, and the texts never connect them. English translations cannot even agree on the bird, which appears as a crane, a stork and, in one widely read version, a gigantic duck.

What the two share is a name and a fate. Baka of Ekachakra had the strength to strip a forest and the cunning to sell protection to the people he ate, but nothing in the story suggests a weakness beyond the obvious one: he met someone stronger who was also hungrier. Bakasura the crane could swallow a god whole and still not keep him down. Both end in the same position, broken in two by a pair of hands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bakasura in the Mahabharata?

Bakasura, called Baka or Vaka in the Mahabharata, is a man-eating rakshasa who lives in a forest near the town of Ekachakra. He protects the district from enemies in exchange for a regular fee of a cartload of rice, two buffaloes and the human being who delivers them, paid by each household in turn.

How did Bhima kill Bakasura?

Bhima took the cartload of food to Baka’s forest, ate it himself while calling the rakshasa by name, and ignored Baka’s blows until he had finished. After a fight with uprooted trees and a wrestling match that shook the earth, Bhima pinned Baka with a knee in his back, seized his neck and waist cloth, and broke him in two. He then made Baka’s relatives promise to stop killing humans and left the body at the town gate.

Is the Bakasura killed by Krishna the same as the one killed by Bhima?

No. The Bakasura killed by Krishna is a separate demon from the Bhagavata Purana who takes the form of a giant crane, while Bhima’s Baka is a rakshasa in the Mahabharata. Vettam Mani’s Puranic Encyclopaedia lists them as two different demons, and neither text links them.

How did Krishna defeat the crane demon Bakasura?

In the Bhagavata Purana, Bakasura swallowed the child Krishna beside a pool on the Yamuna, but Krishna burned the demon’s throat and was spat out unharmed. When Bakasura attacked again with his beak, Krishna grabbed both halves of it and tore the demon apart.

Who was Bakasura’s brother?

In the Mahabharata, the rakshasa Kirmira calls himself Baka’s brother and attacks the Pandavas in the Kamyaka forest to avenge him before Bhima kills him too. In the Bhagavata Purana, the crane demon Bakasura is the brother of the demoness Putana and of the demon Aghasura, whom King Kamsa sends against Krishna to avenge them.

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