Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- 1 Living Fossils: Impressions of a Once and Future World
- 2 Spiral Notebooks: A Multi-Local Shaligram Ethnography
- 3 Picked-Up Pieces: Constructing a History of Mustang
- 4 A Mirror to Our Being: Locating Muktinath, Finding Śālagrāma
- 5 A Bridge to Everywhere: The Birth/Place of Shaligrams
- 6 Turning to Stone: The Shaligram Mythic Complex
- 7 River Roads: Mobility, Identity, and Pilgrimage
- 8 Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
For more than two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an integral part of ritual practice throughout South Asia. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, in the Kali Gandaki River Valley of Mustang, the ritual use of these stones today has become a significant focus of pilgrimage and exchange in India and Nepal and among the global diaspora. But Shaligrams are also deeply intertwined with divine movement, and the challenges of travel to Mustang have resulted in restrictions on a ritual practice that depends upon the mobility of people and stones for its continuation. As a result, many practitioners now believe that the worship of Shaligrams may be in danger of disappearing.
Keywords: Shaligram, pilgrimage, Hinduism, fossil, ammonite
Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
− Shakespeare, The TempestA Hindu pilgrim, recently arrived from South India, stood anxiously next to a bus stand in Mustang, Nepal. “I’m going to burn my passport,” he said. “I’m going to destroy all my documents and go to Damodar. I came here (on pilgrimage) to find Shaligram and I will find Shaligram. You can't put borders on sacred land.” I was taken aback. The Damodar Kund, a glacial lake several days’ walk far to the north, lay beyond the boundary between Upper Mustang and Lower Mustang, and without special permits and astronomical fees, foreigners were not allowed to cross into the politically contentious zone between Chinese-occupied Tibet and Himalayan Nepal. But this was not the first time I would encounter these sentiments. More than once, a Hindu or Buddhist pilgrim would explain how they might hide their passports in a mountain crevasse, strip off their clothes and travel as mute hermits (so that their accents would not give them away) and steal across the border late at night or in an area where there were no roads for government jeeps to travel. In every case, the reasoning was the same: they had come in search of sacred stones, and there was no border that could stop them. This was Shaligram pilgrimage, and where the Shaligram goes, so do the people.
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- Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas , pp. 13 - 46Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020