Dwarka

In the epic and Puranic accounts, Krishna leads his people west from Mathura to escape a persistent enemy and founds a fortified city on the coast of what is now Gujarat. Dvaraka, the city of gates, is described as raised from the sea by divine command, laid out in gold and jewels, and defended by water. It is where Krishna rules as king rather than plays as a cowherd, which is a different aspect of the same figure and the reason the temple here calls him Dwarkadhish, lord of Dwarka.

The end of the story matters as much as the beginning. After a feud destroys the Yadava clan and Krishna is killed by a hunter's arrow, the sea rises and reclaims the city, and the surviving women and children are led away. Hindu chronology places that departure at the beginning of the present age of decline, so the drowning of Dwarka is not merely an episode but the hinge between two ages.

The Dwarkadhish temple stands above the shore on a high plinth, its tower carried on rows of carved pillars, and it is generally attributed to the sixteenth century on foundations far older. A flag is raised on the spire several times each day, sewn by families who hold the right and paid for by devotees who queue years in advance for a turn. Pilgrims complete the visit at Bet Dwarka, an island offshore reached by boat, and often at the nearby Nageshwar shrine, counted among the twelve jyotirlingas of Shiva.

Dwarka holds two places in the geography of Hindu pilgrimage at once. It is one of the four dhams, the abodes at the compass points of the subcontinent that a pilgrim ideally visits in a single circuit with Badrinath in the north, Puri in the east and Rameswaram in the south, an arrangement traditionally credited to Shankara. It is also one of the seven cities said to grant liberation to those who die in them. A monastery at Dwarka is counted among the four seats attributed to Shankara, and its head carries the title of Shankaracharya, so the town is a node of institutional authority as well as of devotion.

Since the 1960s the coast has also been the site of an archaeological argument. Underwater survey off Dwarka and Bet Dwarka has recorded stone structures, anchors and pottery, and the excavator who directed much of the work identified them with the submerged city of the epic. Other archaeologists read the same material as the remains of a historical port of far more recent date, reused stone or natural formation, and object that dating submerged deposits disturbed by currents is extremely difficult.

The atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it. That a real settlement stood on this coast is not in doubt; that it is the Dvaraka of the Mahabharata is a claim archaeology has not established, and the pilgrimage does not depend on the answer.