Sanjaya keeps naming the conches, now turning to the Pandava side. Krishna blew his conch, the Panchajanya; Arjuna blew his, the Devadatta; and Bhima, the man of terrible deeds, blew the great conch called Paundra. The plain sense of the verse is simply this roll call of warriors and their named conches as the answering blast goes up from the Pandava ranks. Almost every commentator on file treats the line first as this straightforward catalogue before drawing anything further from it.

The names in this verse are not arbitrary; each one carries a story or a meaning that the commentators unpack. Krishna is called Hrishikesha, the Lord of the senses, the one who governs the sense organs. The conch Panchajanya is named after a demon, Panchajana, who had taken the form of a conch and whom Krishna slew, taking up the demon's body as his instrument. Arjuna is called Dhananjaya, conqueror of wealth, because he subdued many kings and gathered great riches; his conch Devadatta, meaning given by the gods, was a gift from Indra during the war with the Nivatakavacha demons, and its sound terrified the enemy.

Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhima is given two epithets, and the commentators read both as pointing to his fearsome nature. Bhima-karma means the doer of terrible deeds, earned by his slaying of demons such as Hidimba, Baka, and Jatasura and of mighty foes such as Kichaka and Jarasandha. Vrikodara means wolf-belly, and the explanation offered is that within his stomach burned a special fire named vrka, a wolf-fire, by which an enormous quantity of food could be digested. So the names quietly mark Bhima out as a figure of immense, almost ferocious capacity, fitting for the man who blows the great conch Paundra.

Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Ānandagiri · Lokmanya Tilak · Śrīdhara Svāmī