The Twilight of Dwaraka and the Metaphysical Disintegration of a Yuga: Reflections on the Mausala Parva

When the divine retires, even memory becomes myth.

The Mausala Parva, the sixteenth book of the Mahabharata, stands as a somber and haunting coda to an epic shaped by heroism, dharma, and cosmic war. Set thirty-six years after the cataclysm of Kurukshetra, it chronicles not only the demise of Krishna—the divine architect of destiny—but also the unraveling of his clan, the Yadavas, and the inundation of the fabled city of Dwaraka. What unfolds is not merely a historical denouement, but the metaphysical disintegration of a yuga.

The destruction is both literal and allegorical. The mighty Yadava clan, once unparalleled in strength and splendor, is undone by internal strife—a drunken civil war ignited not by foreign invasion or divine wrath, but by ego, pride, and the slow corrosion of prosperity unmoored from restraint. In the Mausala Parva, dharma decays not through external defeat but through internal decay. It is a portrait of entropy in moral and political order.

Krishna’s death is strikingly unceremonious. The Supreme Being, incarnated to restore cosmic balance, meets his end not on a battlefield but in the forest, felled by the arrow of a hunter who mistakes his foot for a deer. His elder brother Balarama, too, withdraws to the forest and dissolves into the ocean, while their father Vasudeva dies grieving the fratricidal war of his sons. The divine exits not with thunder but with silence.

When Arjuna arrives in Dwaraka, he finds not a city, but a requiem. The mighty kingdom—built on the sea, shimmering with opulence, protected by Krishna’s presence—has already met its fate. Nature, once held at bay by divine will, has reclaimed its due. In a passage as elegiac as it is vivid, Arjuna recounts the final submergence:

“The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. I saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city. Dwaraka was just a name; just a memory.”

What is most unsettling in this vision is the swiftness—the erasure of grandeur not by conquest, but by time. The Mausala Parva does not offer dramatic lamentation; rather, it presents an existential stillness, where the silence after destruction is more deafening than the clash of arms.

The end of Krishna’s era marks the end of Dvapara Yuga, the third age of the cosmic cycle, and signals the fading of divine intervention in human affairs. In response, the Pandava brothers—Arjuna, Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva, and Yudhishthira—renounce their crowns and worldly attachments. With Draupadi, they embark on the Mahaprasthanika—the great departure—towards the Himalayas, in pursuit of heaven, in pursuit of liberation.

The Mausala Parva is thus not merely a chronicle of destruction—it is a meditation on impermanence. It reminds us that even divine kingdoms dissolve, that dharma is cyclical and mortal, and that all stories, however grand, must make peace with their ending. In the fading of Dwaraka and the vanishing of Krishna, the epic confronts us with the ultimate truth: that what remains, in the end, is not empire or lineage—but memory, myth, and the search for meaning beyond the ruins.