The Building of Dwarka

The Bhagavata gives the founding of Dwarka only a short chapter, and the brevity is itself a statement: the building of a magnificent kingdom, the thing the rest of the world spends epics fighting for, is dispatched by the Purana in a few lines, because it is, in this book’s scale of values, the least interesting kind of greatness.

To protect his people from Jarasandha’s endless wars, Krishna had the Yadavas leave Mathura, and the Bhagavata raises their new home from the sea: a city built on land reclaimed from the ocean, fortified, splendid, gated, beyond the reach of the inland armies — Dwarka, “the many-gated,” made, in the Purana’s telling, almost overnight by the divine architect at his request. The text describes its splendour the way it described Ayodhya and Lanka in the other epics, but faster, with less dwelling, because the Bhagavata is deliberately refusing to let a fortress-city be a climax. It is a safe place for the people. That is its whole point and the Purana will not inflate it past that.

What the chapter is actually for is the transformation it marks in Krishna. In Vrindavan he was a cowherd; in Mathura a prince and a deliverer; in Dwarka he becomes, fully and for the rest of his life, a king with a kingdom, queens, sons, ministers, wars, and statecraft. The Bhagavata is careful that this is a descent in register even as it is an ascent in worldly station. The flute is gone; the gopis are a grief behind him; the boy who would not be bound by any rope now rules a walled city by the sea. The Purana wants the reader to feel the cost of the incarnation’s progress: each stage outward into the world’s power is a stage further from the love that was the book’s centre, and Dwarka, for all its gold, is where he is most a king and least the thing the gopis loved.

The Bhagavata also uses Dwarka to set up its long argument with the Mahabharata, which now draws near. The king of Dwarka is the cousin and counsellor and charioteer of the Pandavas; his statecraft, his marriages, his alliances, are the threads that tie this Purana to that war. The chapter is a hinge: behind it, the life of love; ahead of it, the life of the world — diplomacy, dynasty, the great war’s gravity — and the Bhagavata is honest that the second is the harder and lonelier half, even though it looks, from outside, like the triumphant one.

For the reader the founding of Dwarka is the Purana teaching, by proportion, what it values. It will spend long, tender chapters on a poor friend’s fistful of rice and a single bent woman made straight, and a few sentences on the raising of a kingdom from the sea. The Bhagavata’s whole hierarchy is in that allocation: the magnificent is dispatched quickly; the small and the loving are lingered over. A reader who comes to this book for the grandeur has, the Purana keeps signalling, come for the part it cares about least.

The kingdom stood, walled and bright and safe. The Bhagavata now turns to the king’s life inside it — and it begins, characteristically, not with a war or a conquest but with a love story conducted by a smuggled letter, a woman who chose her own husband against her family and arranged her own rescue, the Purana’s Sita-and-swayamvara note struck once more in a new key.