Bhalka Tirth: Where the Hunter's Arrow Found Krishna

The events at Prabhas are told in the Mausala Parva, the sixteenth book of the Mahabharata, which is one of the shortest and hardest sections of the epic.

How it came about:

• After the war, Gandhari, having lost a hundred sons, cursed Krishna that his own clan would destroy itself as hers had
• Separately, young Yadava men played a cruel trick on visiting sages, dressing Samba as a pregnant woman and asking what child would be born
• The sages, seeing through it, said an iron club would be born that would destroy the clan
• The club appeared, was ground to powder and thrown into the sea, and the powder washed ashore as reeds on the beach at Prabhas

What followed:

• The Yadavas came to Prabhas and drank
• A quarrel began over old grievances from the war
• The men pulled up the reeds, which became iron in their hands, and killed one another with them
• Almost the entire clan died on that beach in a single day
• Balarama withdrew to the shore and departed from the world
• Krishna was left alone

Why the epic tells it this way. It would have been easy to end the Mahabharata in glory. It does the opposite, with enormous deliberateness.

• The clan is destroyed not by an enemy but by itself, drunk and arguing
• The weapon is the same club they tried to dispose of, returned as ordinary grass
• The curses that set it going were incurred by arrogance and cruelty, not by heroism
• Nobody is killed by fate arriving from outside. They pick up the reeds themselves

The Mahabharata's judgement on victory is delivered here, at the very end, on a beach in Gujarat.

What happened at Bhalka itself is told briefly, and the brevity is part of its force.

The account:

• After the destruction of his clan, Krishna went into the forest and lay down beneath a tree, resting, with one foot raised
• A hunter named Jara was moving through the undergrowth
• He saw the sole of the foot through the leaves and took it for the ear or face of a deer
• He shot, and the arrow struck the foot
• Coming forward, he found what he had done and was overcome with terror and grief

What Krishna said. This is the part that matters:

• He told Jara not to be afraid and not to grieve
• He said the hunter had done what had to be done, and that no fault attached to him
• He explained that in a former birth Jara had been Vali, the monkey king of Kishkindha, whom Rama had shot from concealment during Vali's duel with Sugriva
• That act now returned, and the account was settled

Why the tradition includes this. The Vali connection is not a footnote. It is doing serious work.

• Rama's killing of Vali is the single most argued about act in the Ramayana, and the text itself has Vali challenge Rama on it directly
• The tradition never quite explains it away, and here it does something better. It has the same soul collect what was owed, in the same body of the divine, in a later age
• The debt is not cancelled by divinity. It is paid

A god who arranges his own departure so that an old and disputed act is answered for is making the strongest possible statement that the moral law is not suspended for him. That is why the Vali episode is remembered at Bhalka, on a shrine to a hunter's mistake.

The story does not end at Bhalka. It ends a short distance away, on the bank of a river.

Dehotsarg:

• The name means the laying down of the body
• It stands on the bank of the Hiran river, near where it reaches the sea
• Tradition holds that Krishna's body was brought here and cremated
• A temple and ghat mark the place, and it is part of the standard circuit from Somnath

What the tradition attaches to the moment:

• Krishna's departure is held to mark the end of the Dvapara Yuga and the beginning of the Kali Yuga
• The date is used as the zero point for the traditional Kali Yuga reckoning
• With him gone, Dwarka was taken by the sea, which the texts describe directly
• Arjuna came to escort the surviving Yadava women and children to safety, and found that his Gandiva bow no longer worked as it had, and could not protect them

That last detail deserves attention. Arjuna, the greatest archer of the age, is beaten by ordinary raiders on the road because the power he had was never simply his own.

What the whole sequence is for. Indian devotion generally prefers Krishna as the child at Gokul, the flute player at Vrindavan, or the charioteer at Kurukshetra. The Mausala Parva is comparatively little read, and Bhalka is comparatively little visited.

But the tradition kept it, and kept the location, and built shrines there. A tradition confident enough to mark the exact spot where its most beloved god was killed by accident, by a hunter who mistook him for a deer, and to explain the accident as a debt from an earlier life, is not a tradition that flinches easily.

Bhalka sits inside a region that carried religious weight long before the Mahabharata, and understanding the setting helps.

Prabhas as a tirtha:

• The name means radiance or splendour
• It is a tirtha of great antiquity, mentioned across the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and pilgrims visited it in the epic's own narrative
• The Triveni Sangam here, where the Hiran, the Kapila and the Saraswati meet the sea, is one of the classic confluences of Indian sacred geography
• Rites for ancestors are performed at the sangam, and immersion of ashes is common

Somnath, five kilometres away, is the region's great shrine and one of the most historically battered temples in India, destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly across a thousand years, and rebuilt again after Independence.

Why so much converges here:

• It is a coastal sangam, where rivers meet the sea, which is the highest category of tirtha
• It sits at the western edge of the subcontinent, which gives it the character of an end point
• The Yadava capital at Dwarka was on this coast, so the clan's final chapter belongs here geographically

The standard circuit. Pilgrims coming to Somnath generally take in:

• Somnath temple and the sea front
• Triveni Sangam
• Bhalka Tirth
• Dehotsarg on the Hiran

It can be done in a day, and it is the correct order, since it follows the sequence of the story rather than convenience.

Getting there

• Bhalka Tirth, about 5 km from the Somnath temple, near Veraval, Gir Somnath district, Gujarat
• Veraval has a railway station, and Diu and Rajkot are the nearest airports, with Ahmedabad the main hub
• Autos and taxis run constantly between Somnath, Bhalka and Dehotsarg
• The whole circuit is short and easily done in half a day

Timings

• Open through the day, with a midday closure at the temple. Check locally
• Mornings are quieter

When to go

• October to March for comfortable coastal weather
• Janmashtami, in Bhadrapada, when Krishna shrines across Gujarat are busy
• Kartik Purnima and Mahashivratri fill Somnath and the surrounding sites
• Avoid the peak of the monsoon on this coast

The circuit, in order

• Somnath temple first, for the setting
• Triveni Sangam, where rites for ancestors are performed
• Bhalka Tirth, for the site of the arrow and the pipal
• Dehotsarg on the Hiran, which is where the story finishes

Practical notes

• Somnath enforces strict security. Phones, bags and cameras are deposited at counters, and this applies at the main temple in particular
• Dress conservatively. These are working shrines with steady pilgrim traffic
• Carry water. The coast is humid and the circuit involves waiting in queues
• If you are performing rites for ancestors at the sangam, arrange a priest in advance rather than accepting the first offer at the ghat

Combining the visit

• Gir National Park, the last home of the Asiatic lion, is within reach and requires advance booking
• Diu, with its Portuguese fort and beaches, is roughly 90 km
• Porbandar and the Gop temple are along the coast to the west

A closing thought. Most pilgrimage in India is organised around beginnings, births and boons. Bhalka is organised around an ending, and around a man who did something terrible by accident and was told immediately that he was not to blame. It is a quiet place, and it is worth the five kilometres from Somnath.