The Stones That Went to Ayodhya

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On 22 January 2024, at the auspicious Abhijit Muhurta of 12:20 pm, in the presence of the Prime Minister of India and four thousand invited saints, the prana pratishtha of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya was performed. The consecration installed, at the garbha griha of the temple, a life-size murti of Ram Lalla — Shri Ram depicted as a five-year-old child, standing, smiling, lifelike, with a presence that devotees across India and the global diaspora have described as transcendent.¹

The murti is fifty-one inches tall. It weighs approximately two hundred kilograms. It was sculpted over many months by Arun Yogiraj, a fifth-generation sculptor from Mysuru, Karnataka, selected by the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust from among three finalist sculptors after a vote of the Board of Trustees on 30 December 2023. The stone from which it was carved is a Krishna Shila — a dark blue-black schist, geologically dated to approximately three billion years of age, quarried from the land of Ramdas H, a seventy-year-old farmer in Gujjegowdanapura village near Mysuru.²

The Ram Lalla murti is not carved from Shaligram. It is not carved from any stone of the Kali Gandaki. The sculptural material originates in southern India, not in Nepal.

This fact is less widely known than it should be. For almost a full year between the public transportation of two massive stones from the Kali Gandaki to Ayodhya in January–February 2023, and the consecration of the temple in January 2024, the predominant assumption across India and the global Hindu community was that the Ram Lalla murti would be carved from those Kali Gandaki stones — referred to in the Indian and Nepali press coverage of the time, consistently, as “Shaligram.” That assumption was not correct. How it was corrected — who corrected it, on what scholarly grounds, and what happened to the Kali Gandaki stones in the end — is the story of this article.

The story matters for two reasons. First, it involves a specific scholarly intervention in the public theological discourse of the Hindu world, at a moment of great emotional stakes, by a scholar whose authority on the Kali Gandaki and its stones is unmatched: Prof. Dr. Kul Raj Chalise. Second, the debate that unfolded in 2023 — about what exactly distinguishes a Dev Shila from a Shaligram Shila, about what the Puranic canon actually says on these questions — brought the Kali Gandaki, and by extension Mukti Kshetra itself, into the living global Hindu consciousness with a visibility the sacred geography had not held in centuries. In that sense, what was in the short term a technical disagreement has in the longer term been a significant re-inscription of Nepal’s Hindu sacred corridor into the awareness of bhaktas worldwide.

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Chapter One: The Shila Yatra

The sequence of events begins on 26 January 2023, at the Galeshwor Mahadev Temple in the Myagdi district of Nepal, where two enormous stones from the Kali Gandaki river were formally honoured with Rudrabhisheka before their departure for India.³ The stones were substantial. By the organising committee’s description, each was roughly seven feet long, five feet wide, and three and a half feet thick. Their weights were reported variously — approximately eighteen tonnes for one and sixteen tonnes for the other in the ANI filings, with other sources citing figures near twenty-six and fourteen tonnes. These were not ammonite fossils. These were boulders — blocks of the black shale bedrock from which, over geological time, the smaller fossil-bearing fragments erode.

The initiative had been developed over the preceding three years. The lead figure on the Nepali side was Bimalendra Nidhi, senior Nepali Congress leader and former Home Minister, who hailed from Janakpurdham — the ancient city of King Janak, birthplace of Sita. Nidhi had been in conversation since 2020 with Champat Rai, General Secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust. Through the Janaki Temple of Janakpur, and with the approval of the Nepali government (granted in December 2022) and the Nepal Department of Mines and Geology, the two stones were excavated from the Kali Gandaki and prepared for transport.⁴

The Shila Yatra — the procession of the stones from Nepal to India — took eight days. The stones moved through a succession of towns, each welcoming them with pujas, garlands, and gathered crowds. They entered India through Gopalganj in Bihar, passed through Uttar Pradesh, and arrived at Ayodhya around 1 February 2023. At a formal ceremony there, Janaki Temple Mahant Ram Tapeshwar Das handed the two stones over to Champat Rai on behalf of the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust.

The language used throughout the Shila Yatra, in both Nepali and Indian press coverage, was that the stones were “Shaligram.” Nidhi himself used the term in his public remarks: “Lord Ram is the incarnation of Bhagwan Vishnu which is why the stone from Kali Gandaki River, if available, would be very good to make Ram Lalla’s murti in Ayodhya.”⁵ Press coverage by ANI, Zee News, DNA India, Deccan Chronicle, HinduPost, and multiple other outlets referred to the stones as “Shaligram shilas.” The Trust’s initial public communication, at the moment the stones arrived, confirmed what everyone assumed: the murtis of Ram Lalla and of Sita would be carved from these Kali Gandaki stones.

For the Nepali government, the Janaki Temple, the Ram Mandir Trust, and the broader Hindu public, this was a moment of great meaning. It was framed as the fulfilment of the Roti-Beti relationship — the ancient bond of bread and of daughters — between Nepal and India, tracing back to the Treta Yuga wedding of Sita and Rama. It was celebrated as proof that, after five centuries of contested history, the Kali Gandaki’s sacred stones would sit at the centre of the most important Hindu temple construction of the twenty-first century.

And in the initial flush of that celebration, a specific theological question was not being carefully examined: are these stones, in the strict canonical sense, Shaligram?

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Chapter Two: The scholar who made the distinction public

The distinction between Shaligram and Dev Shila is not obscure. It is preserved across the Puranic canon and in the oral ritual tradition of every Shaligram-worshipping Vaishnava household. But like many distinctions that were once common knowledge, it had drifted out of general public awareness. In the run-up to the Ayodhya consecration — with national and international attention focused on the symbolism of the Kali Gandaki stones — it required a scholarly intervention to bring the distinction back into the foreground.

Prof. Dr. Kul Raj Chalise, whose decades of field research in the Kali Gandaki corridor and whose own family lineage at Mukti Kshetra establish his authority on these questions more directly than perhaps any other living scholar, made this intervention. In a series of media appearances in Nepali and Indian outlets across 2023, Dr. Chalise clarified the distinction with precision.⁶

The distinction Dr. Chalise drew — and which the Puranic canon supports — is this:

A Shaligram Shila, in the strict canonical sense, must meet specific criteria preserved across the Padma Purana, the Brahma Vaivarta Purana, the Skanda Purana, and the Pranatoshani Tantra:

First, it must be a fossil ammonite — bearing the distinctive spiral chakra-marks attributed by the Puranic tradition to the Vajrakita, the “thunderbolt worm” whose teeth are understood to have left the visible chakra impressions on the stone’s surface.

Second, it must be small — typically of a size that can be held in a single worshipper’s hand, corresponding to the ammonite fossils that erode naturally from the black shale of the Kali Gandaki into the river’s current and are then carried downstream to be found by pilgrims.

Third, it must be self-manifest — svayam-vyakta — meaning found as-is, in the river or on its banks, never carved or shaped by human hands. The chakra-marks are its identifying signature of divine self-presentation.

Fourth, it must be aniconic. Not resembling a human or divine figure. A Shaligram is worshipped as the stone-form of Vishnu, not as a representation of Vishnu.

Fifth, its chakra-marks must be intact. The Puranas are unambiguous on this: “Shalagrama shilas… can be worshipped as long as the chakra inside it has not been broken or cracked.” A Shaligram whose chakra-pattern has been broken loses its ritual validity.

The Dev Shila-s transported from the Kali Gandaki to Ayodhya were, by these canonical criteria, not Shaligram in the strict sense. They were sacred stones of the sacred river — Dev Shila in the general Sanskrit meaning of “divine stone,” invested with the reverence that attaches to anything emerging from the Krishna-Gandaki, the river that flows (in the Puranic tradition) from Vishnu’s own gandasthal. But they were not fossil ammonites. They did not bear the chakra-marks. They were, geologically, the bedrock of the Kali Gandaki — the black shale formation itself — rather than the ammonite fossils that weather out of it into the river.

The distinction is not a matter of scholarly preciousness. It bears directly on the ritual status of the stones and on what can appropriately be done with them. Canonical Shaligram is worshipped as it is found — never carved, never shaped, never anthropomorphised. To carve a Shaligram would be to break the chakra-marks and destroy the object’s ritual validity. It would be, in the idiom of the tradition, closer to the religious equivalent of melting a svayambhu Shiva linga and recasting it as an ornamental object than to any legitimate ritual transformation. The very proposal that the Kali Gandaki stones would be “carved into murtis of Ram and Sita” was, on strict Puranic grounds, an act that could not be performed on Shaligram.

Dev Shila-s hold a different ritual status. They are sacred because of the river they come from and the divine associations the river carries. They can be honoured, installed, placed within temple complexes, and worshipped in their natural form — but they are not, in the strict canonical sense, the self-manifest form of Vishnu. They are stones of the sacred place; they are not stones that are the deity.

Dr. Chalise’s public clarification during 2023 was, essentially, this: the stones transported from the Kali Gandaki to Ayodhya are Dev Shila — sacred stones of a sacred river — and should be honoured as such. They are not, however, Shaligram Shila in the canonical Puranic sense. The tradition’s rules for what can be done with each type are different. It is important, for the integrity of the tradition, that these categories not be conflated.

In early 2023, this was a substantial intervention. The Ram Mandir project was at the emotional centre of Hindu public life. The Kali Gandaki stones had been received with enormous ceremony. To introduce a scholarly clarification that the popular framing was theologically imprecise required both courage and the authority of deep expertise. Dr. Chalise’s scholarship on the Kali Gandaki, and his direct standing as a Nepali local son of the Muktinath region and as a researcher who had worked on these questions for decades, made him one of the very few individuals who could make the intervention with credibility.

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Chapter Three: The national theological debate

What followed, through the middle months of 2023, was a sustained theological conversation in Indian and Nepali media, in religious circles, and in the online Hindu intellectual public sphere. The conversation involved priests, Puranic scholars, representatives of various sampradays, journalists, and members of the educated Hindu laity. The central question was: Can the Ram Lalla murti legitimately be carved from the Kali Gandaki stones?

The arguments on several sides were preserved in the media record of the time.

Some voices held that the stones, whether technically Shaligram or Dev Shila in the canonical sense, were sacred enough that carving a murti of Ram — himself an avatar of Vishnu — from them would be a legitimate use. The Trust’s own initial communications supported this view. In this reading, the Kali Gandaki’s sanctity was such that any stone from the river carried sufficient divine association to warrant sculptural transformation into the principal murti of the most important Hindu temple construction of the modern era.

Other voices, drawing on the Puranic canon, held the stricter position: Shaligram cannot be carved; and even if the specific stones in question were Dev Shila rather than Shaligram, the exceptional sanctity of the Kali Gandaki’s bedrock argued for preservation in natural form — installation at Ayodhya as they were, worshipped without modification. This was the position Dr. Chalise’s scholarship supported.

Still other voices raised a separate practical question. One of the main priests of the Ram Mandir, Durga Prasad Gautam, observed: “We don’t have the tradition of making black granite murtis in North [India].”⁷ This was not a theological argument on canonical grounds but a regional-traditional argument about sculptural material. North Indian iconographic tradition typically works with lighter-colored stones — marble, sandstone — rather than the very dark stones characteristic of south Indian and Nepali temple sculpture. A black schist murti, whether from the Kali Gandaki or elsewhere, would have been atypical for the specific iconographic tradition of Ayodhya.

The several lines of argument converged. By the middle of 2023, the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust was actively exploring alternative sources for the Ram Lalla murti. Public messaging shifted. The Kali Gandaki stones, which had been understood at the moment of their arrival as the future sculptural material, were increasingly described instead as “sacred stones to be preserved and honoured at the temple complex” — language more consistent with Dev Shila status than with the initial Shaligram framing.

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Chapter Four: The Krishna Shila from Karnataka

In March 2023, the Trust finalised an alternative. The stone that would be used for the Ram Lalla murti was identified in Gujjegowdanapura village near Mysuru, in Karnataka. It was a Krishna Shila — a name that caused some confusion in the press coverage, because “Krishna Shila” and the “Krishna Gandaki” river share the Krishna element in their names, but these are unrelated stones with distinct geological origins and properties.

The Karnataka Krishna Shila is a black schist — a metamorphic rock, geologically classified as distinct from ammonite-bearing shale — with a dark blue tint that matches the traditional iconographic representation of both Vishnu and Krishna. Radiometrically dated to approximately three billion years of age, it belongs to the Dharwar Craton, the ancient Precambrian continental crust that constitutes the geological basement of peninsular India. It is substantially older than the Kali Gandaki black shale, which formed in the Jurassic Tethys Sea approximately 150 million years ago.⁸

The sculptor selected for the murti was Arun Yogiraj, a fifth-generation sculptor from Mysuru whose family had been crafting temple murtis for decades. Yogiraj worked over many months on the commission. The Trust formally selected his completed murti — one of three alternatives sculpted by different artists, including Ganesh Bhatt (also Karnataka) and Satya Narayan Pandey (Rajasthan, who had used Makrana marble) — through a vote of the Board of Trustees on 30 December 2023. The announcement was made by Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi on 1 January 2024.⁹

Arun Yogiraj also used stones from the same Karnataka quarry to sculpt the murtis of Bharat, Lakshman, and Shatrughna — the three brothers of Shri Ram — which would join the principal Ram Lalla murti in the Ayodhya temple’s broader iconographic programme.

The Kali Gandaki Dev Shila-s, meanwhile, were preserved at Ayodhya in their uncarved form. The specific details of their installation and their current ritual role at the Ram Mandir complex require direct confirmation from Dr. Chalise and from current Trust documentation. [This element of the article flags as requiring verification before publication.]

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Chapter Five: The consecration, and what it meant

On 22 January 2024, at 12:20 pm, the prana pratishtha of Ram Lalla was performed at Ayodhya. Prime Minister Narendra Modi served as the Mukhya Yajamana — the chief patron — of the ritual. The principal Acharya was Lakshmi Kant Dixit, a Vedic priest from Varanasi. The ceremony was broadcast globally. Estimates of the immediate ritual audience exceeded one hundred million viewers. Ayodhya received 2.4 million visitors in the first twelve days after the temple opened to the public on 23 January 2024, and has been projected to become, over time, among the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world.¹⁰

The murti that was consecrated — the Ram Lalla now installed at the sanctum — is the Krishna Shila murti sculpted by Arun Yogiraj from Karnataka stone. The Kali Gandaki Dev Shila-s did not become the murti. They were, and remain, present at the temple complex in their uncarved form, honoured for what they are: sacred stones of the sacred river that flows, in the Puranic identification, from Vishnu’s own gandasthal.

The theological trajectory, traced from February 2023 to January 2024, reached its resolution. The initial framing had been theologically imprecise. A scholarly intervention — Dr. Chalise’s, and others’ — had brought the precision back. The Trust had responded. The consecration proceeded on canonically appropriate terms. And the Kali Gandaki remained, in the final accounting, what the Puranic tradition had always said it was: the river from which the self-manifest aniconic form of Vishnu emerges, in the form of small chakra-marked fossil ammonites that cannot be carved because they already are Vishnu himself. The large black shale boulders of the river’s bedrock — honoured but distinct — are Dev Shila, holy by association, installed at Ayodhya in their natural form, as the canon requires.

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Chapter Six: What the debate accomplished

A reader might conclude from the above that the story is one of scholarly correction in a moment of popular enthusiasm — a technical argument won in a narrow theological corner. This reading would miss the larger effect.

The more significant outcome of the 2023 debate is the one that has unfolded in the months since. The debate, in the course of its unfolding, did something no planned communication campaign could have done: it placed the Kali Gandaki, and the distinction between Shaligram and Dev Shila, and by extension the sacred geography of Mukti Kshetra itself, into the global Hindu conversation at the highest level of visibility.

Before 2023, most Indian Hindus — and a great majority of the global diaspora — could not have located Muktinath on a map. The Kali Gandaki was, for many, an unfamiliar name, even among those whose households contained Shaligrams inherited from grandparents. The specific theological claim that every Shaligram in every Vaishnava household worldwide came from a single river in one district of one country had been, in practical terms, a forgotten fact — preserved in ritual but absent from the horizon of living awareness.

After 2023, this is no longer quite the case. The Shila Yatra brought the Kali Gandaki into national Indian news cycles for the first time in recent memory. Dr. Chalise’s interventions, and the debate that followed, brought the Puranic details of Shaligram veneration into circulation in venues that ordinarily would not have engaged with them. Ten million households saw, for the first time, that the stones on their puja chowki had a specific origin. Hundreds of news articles, explainer videos, and religious podcasts have since treated the Kali Gandaki and Muktinath in ways that would have been inconceivable before.

This is not insignificant. The sacred geography of Mukti Kshetra, which had drifted toward the edge of popular Hindu awareness over the modern centuries, has been re-inscribed at the centre. The Bodha Retreat mission — to bring the memory of Mukti Kshetra back into the living awareness of the bhaktas — operates in a context that the debates of 2023 have made dramatically more receptive than it would otherwise have been. The ground that Nilkanth Varni walked to, that the Alvars sang to, that Bharata renounced an empire to reach, is — in the early months of 2026 — more widely known in the Hindu world than it has perhaps been in a thousand years.

For this, the sampraday owes Dr. Chalise a specific debt. The scholarly precision he brought to a moment of theological imprecision did not merely correct the record. It illuminated what was already there — the richness, the specificity, the irreplaceable geographical particularity of the Kali Gandaki as a sacred site — and raised this into the general Hindu consciousness at a scale no purely academic publication could have accomplished.

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What remains to be done

The debates of 2023 and the consecration of 2024 are now part of the historical record. What remains, as this article suggests, is the work of consolidation. The new awareness of the Kali Gandaki that the debate created will not, by itself, translate into sustained engagement with Mukti Kshetra as a living sacred ground. The knowledge that one’s household Shaligram came from a specific river in a specific country is a piece of information. The knowledge of why that river is sacred, what has happened there across the centuries, who has walked its banks — that requires sustained communication, careful scholarship, and the kind of pilgrimage that physically returns bhaktas to the ground.

Bodha Retreat is, in part, the institutional response to this gap. The gyan articles on this website — including this one — are the intellectual apparatus. The pilgrimage itself is the experiential completion. Between the two, the sampraday and the broader Vaishnava community may, in the years ahead, restore to its proper place in living Hindu awareness the ground that Puranic tradition has never ceased to identify as one of the eight svayam-vyakta kshetras of Vishnu.

The Ram Mandir stands consecrated at Ayodhya. The Kali Gandaki continues to flow at Mukti Kshetra. The distinction between Shaligram and Dev Shila has been publicly preserved. And the sampraday’s founder, more than two centuries ago, stood on one leg on the banks of this river for four months so that a trajectory would be set in motion.

That trajectory — in ways Nilkanth Varni perhaps foresaw, and in ways he perhaps did not — is still unfolding.

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Notes

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