MEERUT, India (RNS) — In February 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi donned scuba gear and dove off a small boat into the Arabian Sea to perform an underwater ceremony in what some archaeologists say are the submerged remains of the holy city of Dwarka.
“To pray in the city of Dwarka, which is immersed in the waters, was a very divine experience,” Modi told reporters afterward. “I felt connected to an ancient era of spiritual grandeur and timeless devotion.”
The problem, according to other experts of ancient India, is that the ruins beneath the waves off the coast of Gujarat have nothing to do with the city established by the Hindu deity Lord Krishna and found only in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata.
Modi’s subsurface devotions were part of a decade-long project to portray the Mahabharata as the true history of India — and an attempt, many Indians say, to boost ancient Hindu culture as a civilization equal in knowledge to any we have today. Soon after coming to power, Modi told an audience of scientists and physicians that the text’s description of one c …