Dwarka Krishna

Dwarka Krishna

The king-god of the lost city

Dwarka Krishna is the presiding deity of Dwarka, in the Devbhumi Dwarka district of Gujarat. The title matters: this is Krishna not as the flute-player of the bhakti poetry but as Rājā — the king, the ruler of a city. The whole cult is organised around that reading. The temple stands where Krishna is held to have ruled; the festival calendar marks the rebuilding of his capital; and the surrounding villages in the peninsula identify themselves genealogically with the Yadu line of which he is the head.

That claim to a kingdom is what distinguishes Dwarka worship from Krishna worship generally, and it is why the shrines of the Dwarka region are so insistent on his vāsa — his residence in the city. The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata both place the episode of the Yadu race's settlement here, and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa describes the city extensively. The Purāṇic account of the sea-city and of its founder is the textual ground of the shrine, whatever the archaeology of the site may or may not support.

The present temple building is not ancient, and this should be said plainly rather than allowed to slide. The substantial medieval temple traditionally associated with Dwarka was destroyed, and the working shrine was rebuilt in the modern period — the site has been reconstructed, improved and expanded repeatedly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the patronage of successive rulers of the princely states of Kutch and Jamnagar. What antiquity one sees at Dwarka is a mixture: the mukhya śālā and some of the earlier fabric are held to derive from the old structure, while most of what a visitor sees is modern masonry in medieval idiom. Devotees do not regard this as a problem — a rebuilt shrine for a living god is normal in India — but an encyclopedia should not imply otherwise by silence.

The wider Dwarka circuit includes the outlying shrines across the peninsula and the island settlements offshore, where the associations with Krishna's maritime life are strongest. The Śivarīli — the residential quarters of Krishna, still spoken of locally as the place where he walked — is the kind of topographical memory that makes this cult specific rather than generic.

Two cautions about the record. The Sanskrit Bhāgavata Purāṇa is cited in this entry's frontmatter at tier 1, which is defensible as a textual foundation, but nothing in it was checked against an edition for this draft, and the standard of the Purāṇic description is not the same as evidence about the temple. And the entry previously carried no description at all beyond two clipped lines that had the state and district run into the text.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The Bhāgavata Purāṇa supplies the textual basis for Dwarka as Krishna's city, and the Mahābhārata the Yadu-line genealogy. Neither was checked against an edition here, and both should be cited by work rather than by verse.
• The date and sequence of the temple's destruction and reconstruction are not established in this entry. A guardian should consult the gazetteer for Devbhumi Dwarka and the standard architectural histories of Gujarat temples before any century is asserted.
• The vāsa tradition and the island shrines are described in general terms. Whether a given vāsa marker has an independent local source, or only a modern one, needs checking.