He swears three oaths in a single afternoon and the epic makes him keep all three, literally, years later, in front of everyone. That is the whole method of the character. Where the Mahabharata's other heroes hedge, negotiate and consult the subtleties of dharma, Bhima says what he will do to a man's body and then does it, and the poem neither censors the promise nor sanitises the fulfilment.
Wolf-belly
Bhima is the second Pandava, fathered on Kunti by Vayu, which makes him the half-brother of Hanuman across the two epics. His epithet Vrikodara, wolf-belly, covers both his appetite and his digestion, and the tradition treats his eating as a running joke that is also a genuine trait: he is the one who can be relied on to have finished the food.
The strength has an origin story. Duryodhana, unable to bear him even as a boy, feeds him poison and throws him into the river bound; he sinks to the world of the nagas, where serpent-venom neutralises the poison and he drinks from vessels that leave him with the strength of many thousands of elephants. He surfaces days later, entirely well, and the childhood rivalry is set for life.
The things he kills
His career is a sequence of physical problems solved physically, and each has a distinct character.
- Hidimba, a forest rakshasa, whose sister Hidimbi falls in love with Bhima; he marries her by his mother's instruction and their son is Ghatotkacha, who will die in the war absorbing the one-use spear meant for Arjuna.
- Bakasura, a demon extracting a cartload of food and one villager per week from the town of Ekachakra. Bhima eats the cartload on the way and then kills him — the epic's clearest fusion of its comic and heroic registers.
- Jarasandha, king of Magadha, in a wrestling match lasting days. Jarasandha was born in two halves joined by a demoness and reassembles himself whenever he is torn apart. Krishna splits a blade of grass and throws the halves in opposite directions; Bhima takes the hint, tears him and casts the pieces apart.
- Kichaka, the queen's brother at Virata's court, who harasses Draupadi during the year of disguise. Bhima, working as the palace cook under the name Vallabha, keeps the assignation in her place and leaves a body so compacted that it is unrecognisable as a man.
- All hundred Kauravas, over the eighteen days, ending with Duryodhana.
The three oaths
In the assembly hall, after Yudhishthira has gambled away his brothers, himself and his wife, and Dushasana has dragged Draupadi in by the hair and tried to strip her, Bhima swears to tear open Dushasana's chest and drink his blood, and to break Duryodhana's thigh — the thigh because Duryodhana slapped it and told Draupadi to sit there. Draupadi for her part vows to leave her hair unbound until it can be washed in Dushasana's blood.
The Mahabharata delivers on all of it. Bhima kills Dushasana and drinks, and the description is not softened. He breaks Duryodhana's thigh with his mace in a duel where the blow below the waist is explicitly foul, at Krishna's prompting, and the assembled kings object. Balarama, who taught both men mace-fighting, is furious enough to raise his plough against Bhima. The poem is doing something deliberate here: the vengeance is satisfying, the vengeance is a violation, and both facts are left standing.
Meeting his brother
The best scene he has is a defeat. Searching a Himalayan forest for a flower Draupadi wants, he finds an old monkey lying across the path, who asks him to move his tail aside rather than step over him. Bhima, who has never met anything he could not shift, cannot lift the tail with both arms. The monkey is Hanuman, and what follows is a conversation between two sons of the wind about strength and about ages of the world — the only occasion when the epic's strongest man is comprehensively outclassed and is glad of it.
Falling first among the strong
On the final walk into the mountains the Pandavas drop one by one, and Yudhishthira names each failing as it happens. Bhima falls fourth, and the fault assigned to him is his eating and his boasting of his own strength. He is also the one who, all through the exile, argues loudest for war and shortest for patience, and the epic's judgement on him is affectionate and unsparing at once: it likes him and does not think he was right.
Where he is bigger than in India
Javanese and Balinese wayang traditions elevate him enormously. As Bima or Werkudara he becomes a central figure with his own repertoire, marked by a long thumbnail, an inability to speak in high Javanese honorifics to anyone including the gods, and a refusal to bow. The Dewa Ruci story, which has no Sanskrit original, sends him to the bottom of the ocean in search of the water of life, where he meets a tiny being identical to himself and receives a mystical teaching — Bhima as the vehicle for Javanese esoteric doctrine, which is not a role the Indian epic would have predicted for him.
In India his name is attached to landscape all over the subcontinent: the Bhima river in the Deccan, and any number of large rocks, caves and boulders explained locally as things he threw, sat on or used. The prehistoric painted rock shelters at Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh carry a name popularly derived from "Bhima's seat", which places a Palaeolithic site under an epic character's patronage.
The mace, the rakshasa son, and a shared marriage
Was Bhima strong enough to have won the war alone?
The epic implies as much in several places and then systematically prevents it — he is bound by Yudhishthira's decisions, by the rules of engagement, and by the plot's need for Arjuna to be the one who kills Bhishma, Karna and Jayadratha. The relationship between the brothers is one of the poem's better studies of frustration: the man who could end matters immediately is repeatedly told to wait by the man who cannot.
Why is his weapon a mace rather than a bow?
The gada is a crushing weapon used at close range by the very strong, and its association with him is total; both he and Duryodhana are Balarama's pupils in it, which is why their final duel is a matched contest rather than a mismatch. The choice also sorts the epic's characters socially and temperamentally — archery is the aristocratic art of distance and calculation, mace-fighting is not.
What happened to Ghatotkacha?
He is killed by Karna on the fourteenth night, when his sorcery is destroying the Kaurava army in darkness and Karna is finally forced to spend the single-use spear he had been saving for Arjuna. Krishna's reaction is to dance with relief, which appals the grieving Bhima and is one of the sharpest illustrations in the epic of the gap between a father's loss and a strategist's arithmetic. Ghatotkacha has his own following in parts of India and Indonesia, where he is a flying hero of the wayang stage.
Does he have any relationship to Draupadi distinct from his brothers'?
Yes, and the text is consistent about it. He is the husband who acts on her behalf — killing Kichaka, fetching the flower, arguing for war after the dice game — and the one she calls on when she needs something done. Yudhishthira is her king, Arjuna is the one the epic says she loved best, and Bhima is the one who turns up. Tamil Draupadi-cult traditions preserve that emphasis in their festival dramas.