The City Under the Sea: Krishna's Dwarka Between the Mahabharata and Marine Archaeology

The last image of the Mahabharata

Near the end of the Mahabharata, in the book called the Mausala ParvaMausala Parva The sixteenth book of the Mahabharata, in which the Yadavas destroy each other and the sea takes Dwarka., comes one of the darkest passages in Indian literature.

The great war at Kurukshetra is over. Krishna's own people, the Yadavas, have grown proud and careless. A curse falls upon them. In a drunken quarrel on the seashore, they turn on each other with clubs made from blades of grass that have become as hard as iron, until almost all of them are dead. Balarama leaves his body in meditation. Krishna, resting beneath a tree, is struck in the foot by a hunter's arrow and departs from the world.

Arjuna arrives to lead the survivors, mostly women, children and the elderly, away from the city. And as they leave, the text says, the sea rushes in. The ocean that had once given up its land for Krishna's city takes it back. The houses, the streets, the palaces of Dwarka, all are swallowed by the waves while Arjuna and the refugees watch.

It is an image of an ending: of an age, of a family, of a divine presence in the world. For most of history, Indians read it as sacred narrative, not as a report about geology. But it is also, unmistakably, a description of a coastal city lost to the sea. And the Indian coast, it turns out, has a long and real history of exactly that.

The city by the sea

According to the Mahabharata, the HarivamshaHarivamsha An appendix to the Mahabharata telling Krishna's life and lineage, including the founding of Dwarka. and several Puranas, Krishna founded Dwarka after leading the Yadavas away from Mathura, which had come under repeated attack from the powerful king Jarasandha. He chose a site on the western sea. In some accounts, the land was reclaimed from the ocean, which withdrew to make room for the new city. The texts describe Dwarka as magnificent: fortified, gated, filled with palaces and gardens.

The name means something like "the city of gates" or "the doorway", and it has given its name to a real town at the western tip of the SaurashtraSaurashtra The peninsula of western Gujarat, between the Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Khambhat. peninsula in Gujarat. Modern Dwarka is home to the great Dwarkadhish temple, one of the most important Krishna temples in India, and one of the four dhams, the sacred abodes at the four corners of India associated with Adi Shankaracharya. A little to the north, just off the port of Okha, lies the island of Bet Dwarka, also linked to Krishna in tradition.

Readers of our essay on time dilation may remember an echo here. In the Puranas, the city where King Kakudmi ruled, Kushasthali, is identified with the site where Dwarka was later built; the Vishnu Purana says so in so many words. The two stories, one about time and one about the sea, meet in the same place.

The obvious question, asked by archaeologists for more than half a century, is simple: is there anything under the water?

Digging on land first

The first scientific excavations were on dry land. In 1963, archaeologists from the Deccan College in Pune, working with the Gujarat state government, dug near the Dwarkadhish temple. Beneath the modern town, they found the remains of earlier settlements, layered one upon another. The oldest levels they reached appeared to date from around the first or second century BCE.

A later dig near the temple, in 1979 and 1980, found something that pointed towards the sea: evidence that an earlier settlement there had been destroyed by the sea. A town on this coast lived with the ocean as a constant neighbour, and sometimes as an enemy.

But a settlement from the last centuries BCE is not the same as a city from the time of the Mahabharata, which tradition places much earlier. To look for anything older, archaeologists had to go underwater.

S. R. Rao and the stones on the seabed

In 1981, India's National Institute of Oceanography in Goa set up a Marine Archaeology Centre. One of its leading figures was the distinguished archaeologist S. R. Rao, who had earlier excavated the Harappan port of Lothal in Gujarat.

Between 1983 and 1990, Rao's teams made a series of underwater expeditions off Dwarka and Bet Dwarka. Diving in murky water with strong currents, they found and documented stone structures on the seabed: dressed stone blocks, sections of what appeared to be walls, and many large stone anchors, some triangular with holes cut through them for ropes.

Rao interpreted the finds boldly. He argued that they were the remains of a fortified town and port that had been submerged by the sea, and he dated it to around the middle of the second millennium BCE, the period many traditional chronologies associate with the Mahabharata. In his book The Lost City of Dvaraka, published in 1999, he presented the discoveries as evidence that the city described in the epic had been real.

On Bet Dwarka, excavations reported pottery and other objects that some archaeologists dated to the later second millennium BCE, including a seal carved from a conch shell. Those finds suggested that people were living in the area at a very early date.

Rao's work was groundbreaking. It established marine archaeology as a serious discipline in India, and it showed beyond doubt that there are man-made structures on the seabed off Dwarka.

The doubts

The question is not whether there are ruins under the sea at Dwarka. There are. The question is how old they are, and that turned out to be much harder to answer.

Dating underwater remains is notoriously difficult. Stone blocks and walls cannot be dated directly by radiocarbon. Objects lying on the seabed can be moved by currents, waves and storms, so finding two objects near each other does not prove they are the same age. Pottery fragments can drift. Layers that would be clear on land are churned up under water.

In the years after Rao's surveys, other archaeologists, including later researchers at the same National Institute of Oceanography, looked again at the evidence. Several of them argued that many of the finds, particularly the stone anchors, belonged to much later periods. Triangular and grapnel-shaped stone anchors of the kinds found off Dwarka are known from the historical period, used by ships trading across the Arabian Sea in the first millennium CE and later. Some of the structures, they suggested, could be the remains of a historical port, or of jetties and walls built in later centuries.

The Archaeological Survey of India, through its Underwater Archaeology Wing, carried out further explorations at Dwarka in the 2000s, recovering stone sculptures, anchors and other objects, and fresh underwater surveys were reported in 2025. The work continues.

Where does that leave us?

There certainly are submerged man-made structures off Dwarka.
The Dwarka coast has been inhabited for a very long time, and the sea has destroyed at least one settlement there.
Whether any of the underwater structures date back to the time traditionally assigned to the Mahabharata has not been established to the satisfaction of most archaeologists. Many finds probably belong to the historical period.

That is a less dramatic conclusion than "Krishna's city found", but it is an honest one. And the underwater remains are fascinating in their own right: the traces of a port that connected this coast to the wider world across the sea for centuries.

How do you date a wall under the sea?

The Dwarka debate turns on a technical question that most people never think about: how do archaeologists work out the age of something lying on the seabed? The answer explains why the experts disagree.

Radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon-14 in once-living material, such as wood, charcoal, bone or shell. It can date organic material up to about 50,000 years old. But it dates the organism, not the structure. A beam of wood tells you when the tree died, not when it was built into a wall, or whether it was reused. And shells from the sea carry a built-in error, called the marine reservoir effect, because seawater contains "old" carbon. Marine samples often appear a few centuries older than they really are unless this is corrected.

Thermoluminescence dating can be used on fired pottery and burnt stone. When pottery is fired, the heat resets a kind of internal clock in its crystals. Afterwards, natural radiation slowly builds up trapped energy in those crystals. Heating a sample in the laboratory releases that energy as light, and measuring the light reveals how long ago the pot was fired.

Optically stimulated luminescence, a related method, dates when grains of sand or sediment were last exposed to sunlight before being buried. It can help date the layers of sediment that cover or underlie a structure, giving a range of time within which the structure must have been built or abandoned.

Typology compares objects with others of known date. Pottery styles, anchor shapes and building techniques change over time in recognisable ways. If a triangular stone anchor with three holes closely matches anchors found at well-dated historical sites around the Arabian Sea, that is evidence that it belongs to a similar period.

Each method has limits, and under water every one becomes harder. Strong currents move objects around, so finds may not lie where they were dropped. Sediment layers are disturbed. Marine organisms encrust surfaces. Visibility is poor. A date from one piece of wood or one pot says little about an entire site.

That is why the most careful archaeologists insist on several independent methods agreeing before they put a date on a submerged structure. S. R. Rao's early dating relied heavily on comparisons and on finds whose relationship to the walls was not always clear. Later researchers, comparing the anchors with well-dated examples elsewhere, reached different conclusions. Neither side was being careless. They were working at the very edge of what the methods allow, in one of the most difficult environments in archaeology.

Why the sea really did rise

There is a deeper scientific truth behind the legend of Dwarka, and it does not depend on dating any one wall.

Twenty thousand years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, enormous ice sheets covered much of North America and northern Europe. So much water was locked up in ice that sea levels around the world were about 120 metres lower than today. Coastlines everywhere lay far out from where they are now. Off western India, large areas of what is now shallow sea, including much of the Gulf of Khambhat and the shelf off Saurashtra, were dry land.

As the ice melted, the seas rose, at times by more than a metre per century. Most of that rise had happened by around 7,000 years ago. People who lived on those ancient coasts would have watched the sea creep inland, generation after generation, swallowing beaches, river mouths, forests and perhaps settlements.

On top of that global rise, the coast of Gujarat is geologically restless. The Kutch region, just north of Dwarka, is one of the most earthquake-prone areas in India. In June 1819, a great earthquake struck the Rann of KutchRann of Kutch A vast salt marsh in northern Gujarat, flooded by the sea in the monsoon and shaken by great earthquakes.. The fort of Sindri, near the coast, sank and was flooded by seawater, with only its top visible above the waves. A short distance away, a long ridge of land rose by several metres, damming a river channel. Local people called it Allah Bund, "the dam of God". In 2001, the Bhuj earthquake devastated the same region again.

So the idea that coastal land on this part of India's coast can sink, be flooded or be swallowed by the sea is not myth at all. It is documented history and geology. Whether or not the ruins off Dwarka are as old as the Mahabharata, the epic's image of a city taken by the ocean describes something that really happens on this coast.

The lost city that never was

No account of Dwarka would be complete without a cautionary tale from the Gulf of Khambhat, the long inlet of the sea between Saurashtra and mainland Gujarat.

In 2001, India's National Institute of Ocean Technology was surveying the gulf for pollution, using sonar to map the seabed at depths of around 30 to 40 metres. The sonar images showed what looked like regular, geometric patterns on the sea floor: lines and rectangles that some observers interpreted as the outlines of buildings and streets. Divers could not easily explore the area, because the gulf has some of the strongest tidal currents in the world, with tides that rise and fall by several metres.

Instead, the survey dredged objects from the seabed: pieces of wood, stones that looked worked, pottery fragments, beads and what were described as fossilised bones. In May 2001, the discovery was announced to the world as an ancient city. In January 2002, a piece of wood was radiocarbon dated to around 9,500 years ago, and headlines proclaimed a lost city older than any known civilisation. The writer Graham Hancock featured it in his best-selling work on submerged ancient civilisations.

Archaeologists and geologists raised serious objections.

Nothing was found in place. The objects were dredged up, not excavated. In a gulf with such powerful tidal currents, objects can travel long distances along the seabed. There was no way to show that the wood, the stones and the pottery came from the same place, or the same time.
A date for wood is not a date for a city. The 9,500-year-old wood proves that a tree grew 9,500 years ago. It does not prove that anyone built anything with it.
Sonar patterns can mislead. Natural features such as sand ridges, sediment waves and rock formations can produce regular patterns in sonar images, and processing can create artificial-looking features. Without divers or core samples, there was no confirmation that the patterns were man-made.
No follow-up. Despite the extraordinary claims, the site was not followed up with the kind of systematic excavation that would be needed to establish a city.

The Gulf of Khambhat "city" is now regarded by most archaeologists as unproven at best. It is a reminder that an exciting headline is not the same as evidence, and that the sea, which hides so much, also makes it very easy to see what we want to see.

Other cities the sea took

Dwarka is not the only Indian city remembered as lost to the sea.

In Tamil Nadu, the ancient port of Kaveripoompattinam, also called Poompuhar, at the mouth of the Kaveri, was one of the great trading cities of the Sangam ageSangam age The early centuries BCE and CE, when the oldest Tamil poetry was composed and Tamil ports traded with Rome., linked to Rome, Southeast Asia and beyond. The Tamil epic Manimekalai tells how the city was swallowed by the sea as divine punishment when its king neglected a festival. Underwater surveys off Poompuhar have found submerged structures, and onshore excavations confirm a substantial historical port. Here too, interpretations of the underwater remains range from careful to wildly exaggerated.

Further south, Tamil tradition speaks of Kumari Kandam, a vast land said to have stretched south from India before being swallowed by the ocean, taking ancient Tamil academies with it. That idea grew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly through the European notion of "Lemuria", a hypothetical sunken continent proposed in the 1860s to explain the distribution of lemurs. Plate tectonics has since shown that no such continent sank in the Indian Ocean in human times. Rising seas at the end of the Ice Age did submerge real land along the coast, but on a scale of coastal plains, not continents.

And far beyond India, Plato's story of Atlantis, a powerful island destroyed by the sea "in a single day and night of misfortune", has inspired endless searches and claims. Humans who live by the sea seem to carry a deep memory, or a deep fear, of the ocean taking back the land.

The claims, checked

The claim	Verdict	What the evidence shows
"There are ruins of a city under the sea off Dwarka."	Confirmed	Underwater surveys since the 1980s have documented man-made stone structures, blocks and many anchors on the seabed off Dwarka and Bet Dwarka.
"These ruins prove that Krishna's Dwarka existed as described in the Mahabharata."	Not established	S. R. Rao dated the remains to the second millennium BCE, but many archaeologists consider much of the material, especially the anchors, to be from the historical period. No inscription or find links them to the epic.
"The sea really can swallow coastal land in this region."	Confirmed	Global sea level rose about 120 metres after the last Ice Age, and the Kutch coast has sunk and risen in historic earthquakes, such as the Sindri flooding of 1819.
"A 9,500-year-old city was found in the Gulf of Khambhat."	Unproven	Based on dredged objects and sonar images. The dated wood was not shown to come from any structure, and the objects were not found in place.
"Kumari Kandam was a sunken continent south of India."	Not supported	Plate tectonics rules out a sunken continent in human times. Post-Ice Age sea-level rise did flood coastal plains.

What the sea remembers

It is easy to treat the Dwarka debate as a contest between believers who want the epic proved and sceptics who want it disproved. That misses what is most interesting.

The Mahabharata ends with a city lost to the sea. On the real coast of Gujarat, we find settlements damaged by the sea, ruins lying beneath the waves, and a landscape where the land has sunk in living memory. Around the world, at the end of the last Ice Age, rising seas drowned coastlines on which human beings lived. Every culture that lived by the sea had reason to tell stories about cities that the ocean took back.

Whether the stones off Dwarka are the remains of Krishna's golden city, or of a busy historical port that inherited his name, they tell a true story: of people who built by the sea, traded across it, and were sometimes defeated by it. That story is old, it is human, and it is still being written along every coast threatened by the rising waters of our own century.

Perhaps that is the most urgent lesson of the Mausala Parva today. The epic says the sea reclaimed Dwarka when the age turned and its people lost their way. Our own seas are rising again, this time because of the way we live. The image of a city going under the waves is not only a memory. It may also be a warning.