Of all the Pandavas, Bhima was the one nobody worried about. He had wrestled a rakshasa to death in the forest of Hidimba. He had carried his mother and four brothers out of a burning house on his back. His strength was said to equal ten thousand elephants. So when he went off hunting alone in the Himalayan forests during the years of exile, no one thought twice.
That afternoon, Bhima met something he could not fight. And the creature that caught him turned out to be his own ancestor, a man who had once sat on the throne of heaven.
Caught in the Coils
The Pandavas were living near the Himalayas, in the later years of their forest exile. Bhima, restless as always, took his bow and sword and went roaming through the woods, killing deer and boar and scattering the animals as he went. Near a mountain cave he stumbled into the path of an enormous python, a serpent so vast that its body filled the hollow, its skin mottled like turmeric, its mouth gaping like a cave of its own.
Before Bhima could react, the snake had wrapped him in its coils.
He strained against them. Nothing happened. The man who had crushed Kichaka and Baka with his bare hands could not so much as loosen one loop of the serpent’s body. His strength had simply drained out of him, and he could not understand why.
Bewildered, he did the only thing left. He asked the snake who it was.
The King Who Fell From Heaven
The python answered in a human voice. I am Nahusha, it said, son of Ayu. I am your ancestor.
Nahusha was no minor name. He was the father of Yayati, and so a forefather of both the Pandavas and the Kauravas. More than that, there had been a time when he ruled heaven itself. When Indra fled his throne after killing the demon Vritra, burdened by the sin of that slaying, the gods needed a king. They chose Nahusha, a mortal ruler famous for his virtue, and made him Indra in Indra’s place.
Power ruined him. Nahusha began to desire Shachi, Indra’s queen, and demanded she come to him. Shachi, on the advice of the gods’ guru Brihaspati, sent back a condition: come to me in a vehicle no one has ever used, a palanquin carried by the great rishis. Drunk on his new status, Nahusha agreed. He yoked the seven sages to his litter like bearers.
The sages carried him, but not fast enough for his liking. Impatient, Nahusha touched the head of the sage Agastya with his foot and shouted sarpa, sarpa, which means “move, move.” The word also means “snake.”
Agastya took him at his word. Fall, he said, and become a serpent. Nahusha tumbled out of heaven and landed on earth as the python Bhima now faced.
But he had begged for mercy as he fell, and Agastya had softened the curse. Nahusha would keep his memory. Any creature he seized, however strong, would lose its strength. And he would be freed on the day someone answered his questions correctly.
It had been a very long wait. And now, Nahusha told Bhima, he was hungry, and a descendant of his had wandered into his coils at the sixth hour of the day, the time set for his meal.
Yudhishthira Follows the Omens
Back at the hermitage, Yudhishthira began to see terrible signs. A jackal howled toward the south. A one-winged, one-legged bird screamed at the sun. Fierce winds blew grit into his face, and his left arm trembled. He knew something had happened to Bhima. Leaving Arjuna and the twins to guard Draupadi, he took the family priest Dhaumya and followed his brother’s trail of broken trees and slain animals until he found him, wrapped motionless in the body of a giant snake.
Yudhishthira did not reach for a weapon. He asked the snake who it was and what it wanted. Nahusha explained. He would release Bhima, he said, if Yudhishthira could answer his questions. If not, Bhima would be his dinner.
Who Is a Brahmana?
The first question was one Nahusha had clearly thought about during his long years in the dust. Who is a true brahmana? And what is the one thing worth knowing?
Yudhishthira answered that a brahmana is a person in whom truthfulness, generosity, forgiveness, good conduct, gentleness, self-discipline and compassion are found. And the thing worth knowing is the supreme Brahman, which lies beyond both happiness and sorrow, and having reached which no one grieves.
Nahusha pressed him. Those qualities can be found in a shudra too, he said. Is a shudra with such virtues then a brahmana?
Yudhishthira did not flinch. If these marks are found in a shudra and missing in a brahmana, he said, then that shudra is not a shudra, and that brahmana is not a brahmana. Birth, he argued, was hard to trace and easy to claim. Conduct was what counted.
The two went on, trading questions about the soul and the mind and what carries a person from one life to the next. Then Nahusha said something that must have struck close to home. Even I, he admitted, was undone by pride. I sat where Indra sat, and I lost everything because I stopped seeing clearly. Prosperity, he warned his descendant, makes the wisest men foolish.
The Release
Satisfied, Nahusha loosened his coils. Bhima was free. And in that moment the curse ended too. The python’s body fell away, and Nahusha rose in a radiant celestial form, took his leave of the two brothers, and returned to heaven, this time without a palanquin.
It is a quieter episode than the dice game or the war, tucked away in the Vana Parva, but it rhymes with the famous Yaksha Prashna that comes later: once again the strongest Pandava is helpless, and once again the brother who saves him does it with answers, not arrows. And it gives the Mahabharata’s rulers a warning from inside their own family tree. The throne of heaven itself is not high enough to protect you from your own arrogance.