The Lord's City Sits on Sand

As the underwater search continues for relics from the mythical Dwarka of Lord Krishna submerged under the Arabian Sea, are ecological threats to the still- inhabited city on the Gujarat shore getting less attention than they deserve?

- Pritha Vashishth

SMOKE coils upwards from the burning pyres as the old man, caretaker of the masaan (cremation ground), looks at the sea at Dwarka’s Gayatri beach and recalls Arjuna’s words from the 16th of the Mahabharata’s 18 chapters, the ‘Mausala Parva’: “The sea, which had been beating against the shores, broke the boundaries imposed by nature. It rushed into the beautiful city and swallowed everything in its path. I watched as the grand buildings submerged one by one. In just a few moments, it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city anymore. Dwarka was just a name, just a memory.” The warrior prince had been motivated to fight his cousins in the Kurukshetra war in the verses of the Bhagavad Gita by Sri Krishna, also known as Dwarkadhish or lord of Dwarka—the mythical coastal metropolis that Arjuna, long after winning that war, watched the sea swallow following years of bloodbath among the ruling Yadavas.

Badri Bhandari, the elderly caretaker who has premonitions of the mythical catastrophe befalling the city again, then turns to look at the two bodies on their last journey in the flames not far from a burial spot for dead children and says, “I’m first a servant of death, only then a devotee of Krishna.” This seaside cremation ground is at one end of the beach that takes its name from Gayatri Mata in whose honour a temple was built in 1983 at the other end. It’s the only temple in Devbhoomi Dwarka district, on the south-western tip in the Gulf of Kutch, where the “mother of the Vedas” is worshipped.