Duryodhana’s first attempt to eliminate a Pandava predates even the Lakshagraha conspiracy, and it targeted the cousin whose physical strength he found most immediately threatening: Bhima, whose size and appetite as a boy already outpaced every other prince at court, and whose casual displays of strength during rough childhood play – lifting other boys and tossing them around, by some accounts breaking bones without particular malice or effort – had already made Duryodhana both jealous and afraid of what an adult Bhima might become.
A meal laced with kalakuta poison
During a riverside excursion and feast organized ostensibly for all the cousins together, Duryodhana arranged for Bhima’s food specifically to be laced with kalakuta, a powerful poison, counting on Bhima’s famously large appetite to guarantee he would eat more than enough to guarantee the poison’s effect. Bhima, unaware, ate as he always did, and the poison took hold quickly.
Once Bhima had lost consciousness, Duryodhana and his allies bound his hands and feet and threw him into the Ganga, intending for the river to carry away both the body and any evidence connecting the death back to the court.
A serpent bite that saved rather than killed
What happened next inverted the plan entirely. Bhima sank to the bottom of the river, into the realm of the Nagas, where he was bitten repeatedly by serpents – an event that, rather than finishing him off, worked to neutralize the kalakuta poison already in his system, since Naga venom and the poison interacted in a way that counteracted rather than compounded the toxic effect. Bhima woke at the bottom of the river, still bound, surrounded by serpents that had just inadvertently saved his life.
The Naga king, recognizing Bhima’s lineage – he was, through Kunti’s mantra, a son of Vayu, the wind god, and thus connected by divine parentage to figures the Nagas held in some regard – freed him, treated him as an honored guest, and offered him a boon: a magical drought called rasakundika, granting the strength of a thousand elephants. Bhima drank several servings of it over the days he remained with the Nagas, emerging with strength far beyond what he’d had even before the poisoning, and returned to Hastinapura as though nothing unusual had happened, saying little about the ordeal.
An attempted murder that backfired completely
Duryodhana’s plot, intended to remove his strongest rival while he was still young enough not to be missed too gravely, instead produced exactly the outcome he’d been trying to prevent: a Bhima who returned measurably more powerful than before, having survived poisoning, drowning, and captivity among serpents, entirely unbeknownst to the court that had assumed the matter quietly closed. It is the first of several attempts on Bhima’s life across the epic, and the first proof that killing him would prove considerably harder than Duryodhana’s plans ever seemed to anticipate.