Stones That Are Kin

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In 2016, a young cultural anthropologist named Holly Walters arrived in Kathmandu on a Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant to begin sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork. Her destination was not the old cities of Nepal, nor Lumbini, nor Kathmandu’s great Pashupatinath. It was Muktinath, the pilgrimage temple at 3,800 metres at the foot of the Thorong La pass in upper Mustang — and the Kali Gandaki river valley below it. Her research subject was a single class of sacred objects: the Shaligram shila, the ammonite fossils understood by practitioners as self-manifest forms of Vishnu.

Walters, then a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, had come into the project from an unusual angle. She was not Hindu, not a member of any sampraday, not working from within the tradition’s own theological premises. She was an outside observer, trained in the methods of cultural anthropology, specifically in the subfield that concerns itself with the relationship between ritual practice, material objects, and human personhood. What she produced, after two years of fieldwork in Nepal and India, and several more years of writing, analysis, and peer review, was a doctoral dissertation at Brandeis, followed in 2020 by a book — Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas, published by Amsterdam University Press. A second book, Outward Spiral: Shaligram Interpretive Traditions, followed a few years later.¹

It is, in the estimation of her reviewers, “the most comprehensive study of the living fossils written to date” — scholar Don Messerschmidt’s phrase, writing in Himal Southasian.² For the Bodha Retreat project, Walters’s work is significant because it represents what may be the single most rigorous academic documentation of the Shaligram tradition available in English. It is the kind of external verification that gives the tradition’s claims a standing in the contemporary academic conversation that they have not had in any previous generation. And it contains, alongside its careful descriptive scholarship, a philosophical intervention that bears directly on how the sampraday itself might understand what a Shaligram is.

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The ethnographic situation

Walters’s fieldwork was concentrated in two settings. The first was the Kali Gandaki river valley, including Muktinath itself and the settlements along the pilgrimage route — Jomsom, Kagbeni, Muktinath — where she observed the arrival of Shaligram pilgrims during the pilgrimage seasons of 2016 and 2017. The second was the household ritual life of Shaligram practitioners in India (particularly in West Bengal, where she had conducted earlier fieldwork on Vaishnava ritual in Mayapur and Kolkata) and among the South Asian diaspora.

This double setting — source and destination, river and household — was deliberate. Walters’s central theoretical question was about mobility: how an object, sacred and specifically located in its origin, travels into the everyday spaces of distant homes, and what happens to both the object and the homes in the process. The Shaligram was ideal for this question because its geography of origin is so narrowly defined. Every Shaligram in the world comes from a single river, in a single district, in a single country. And Shaligrams are, as a matter of practice, carried home by pilgrims — taken out of the valley, across the passes of the Himalaya, to Indian homes and increasingly to diaspora homes in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, the Gulf. Each stone is simultaneously from a place and in a place that is not that place. Walters’s formulation: “Shaligrams become capable of being both from a place and carrying that place with them.”³

The sixteen months of observation produced thousands of pages of field notes — pilgrim interviews, ritual observations, genealogies of household Shaligrams traced back across generations, records of the daily negotiations between Hindu pilgrims, Mustangi Bon shamans, and the nuns of Narsingh Gompa. Walters also worked closely with Nepali Sanskrit and oral tradition holders, with Tibetan Buddhist practitioners at the Narsingh Gompa and at Lo Manthang, and with the Bon priests whose authority in the upper Mustang region predates both Hinduism and Buddhism.

The result is a study of extraordinary ethnographic density. It is also, for any reader approaching the Shaligram tradition from within the Vaishnava fold, a remarkable experience of recognition. Walters describes, in precise ethnographic detail, what satsangis and Vaishnava practitioners have been doing for centuries. Her description does not agree or disagree with the tradition’s theological claims. It documents the practice as the practice presents itself. What emerges is a portrait of Shaligram life that is neither reducible to “religion” in the Western secular sense nor to “mythology” in the dismissive sense — but something more interesting than either.

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The philosophical intervention

The specific theoretical contribution of Walters’s work is a re-framing of the question of what the Shaligram is. The Western academic tradition, inheriting Enlightenment distinctions, has tended to ask the question in either-or form: is the Shaligram a geological fossil, or is it a deity? For most of the past century, academic description of such objects has defaulted to the geological answer, treating the religious claim as something human beings project onto what is, at its core, a physical object.

Walters rejects this framing with unusual directness. She writes:

“I do not refer to devotees ‘believing’ in Shaligrams any more than I might refer to a paleontologist as ‘believing’ in fossils… They are fossils. They are deities.”⁴

The grammatical construction is precise. Walters is not using an analogy. She is stating that, in the ontological framework of the communities she studied, the Shaligram is simultaneously a geological fossil and a divine being — not one under the guise of the other, not one interpreted as the other, but both, at the same time, without contradiction.

Her point is not that the religious community is confused about the Shaligram’s nature, nor that Western science is mistaken about it. Her point is that the practitioners operate with a theory of reality in which the geological and the theological are not mutually exclusive categories. The Shaligram is a fossil — yes, literally, a fossilised ammonite, the preserved shell of a Jurassic cephalopod. And the Shaligram is a deity — yes, literally, Vishnu in his aniconic self-manifest form. Both statements are true simultaneously. The contradiction the Western academic frame would impose does not arise within the tradition’s own ontology because the tradition never distinguished the two domains in the first place.

This is a sophisticated position. Walters has elaborated it in several journal articles, most notably “Cornerstones: Shaligrams as Kin” in the Journal of Religion (2022). She traces it to the broader anthropological movement known as the ontological turn — the theoretical position that different cultural communities operate with genuinely different theories of what is real, and that the anthropologist’s job is not to translate their claims into familiar Western categories but to take their ontological framework seriously as a working description of the world.

For the Shaligram tradition, this ontological framework is well-defined. The svayam-vyakta principle — that certain physical objects are self-manifestations of deity, without requiring ritual consecration — has been part of the Vaishnava canon for two thousand years. The stone’s status as Vishnu is not a later interpretation added to a geological object; it is what the tradition has always said about it. Walters’s contribution, in presenting this framework to a contemporary academic audience, is not to endorse the tradition’s claim but to refuse the false choice that the Western frame would otherwise impose.

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Shaligrams as kin

The title of Walters’s 2022 journal article — “Cornerstones: Shaligrams as Kin” — points to the second major finding of her ethnographic work. The Shaligram, in Vaishnava household practice, is not merely an object of worship. It is a family member.

Walters documents this in extensive detail. Households that possess a Shaligram describe the stone by name, address it with honorifics (“Thakurji,” “Lalji,” “Shaligram-ji”), speak to it in the course of ordinary daily life, dress it according to the season, feed it before members of the family eat, include it in family photographs, consult it before major decisions, and pass it — across generations — from parents to children as the most sacred inheritance the family transmits. When a Shaligram breaks (which is rare, and usually considered inauspicious), households perform funerary rites. When a family celebrates a wedding, the Shaligram attends. When a child is born, the Shaligram is the first member of the household to see them.

The practice of Tulsi Vivah — the ritual marriage of Tulsi to Shaligram, performed annually in Vaishnava households on the Prabodhini Ekadashi of Kartik month — is, Walters notes, the most formal ritual expression of this kinship. The Shaligram is literally married, in full ritual form, to the tulsi plant in the courtyard. Priests are invited. Mantras are recited. A wedding feast is served. Guests attend. The stone is the groom. The plant is the bride. The ritual is not symbolic performance of a theological idea; it is the actual marriage of the household’s divine resident to the household’s sacred flora, extending and renewing a relationship that the Puranic tradition traces back to the original reconciliation of Vishnu and Vrinda.⁵

For Walters, the theoretical significance is that Shaligrams are treated, by their human families, as persons. Not as objects that represent deity. Not as ritual objects with symbolic function. Persons. With a relationship to the household that is ongoing, evolving, and structured by the same kinship norms that structure relationships between human family members.

This is the ethnographic confirmation of the Puranic claim. The Puranas insist that the Shaligram is Vishnu sannihito — perpetually present, continuously inhabiting the stone. The practitioners insist that the Shaligram is not a thing but a who — a presence with whom the household has a continuous relationship. Walters’s contribution is to document this insistence with the scholarly care of a cultural anthropologist, such that it enters the academic record not as a curiosity but as a well-attested ethnographic fact about a living tradition.

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The pilgrimage in practice

The second major descriptive contribution of Walters’s work is her detailed account of the Shaligram pilgrimage itself — what actually happens when a pilgrim travels to the Kali Gandaki to find a Shaligram.

The pilgrimage, she documents, is not what most Western observers assume it to be. Pilgrims do not go to Muktinath primarily to find Shaligrams; they go primarily to perform darshan at the Muktinath temple and to bathe at the 108 Mukti Dhara. The Shaligram-finding is a secondary activity, performed on the walk up to or down from the temple, along the Kali Gandaki riverbed in the stretch between Jomsom and Kagbeni.

The finding itself, Walters observes, is relational rather than transactional. Pilgrims do not select Shaligrams; they believe the Shaligrams select them. A practitioner walking along the riverbed watches the stones. A specific stone catches the eye. There is a feeling — pilgrims struggle to describe it — that this is the one. The pilgrim picks up the stone. The stone either “is right” or “is not right”; if not right, the pilgrim puts it back and continues. If right, the pilgrim takes it. The criteria for “rightness” are not explicit. They are experiential. The stone has communicated its identity as the stone for this pilgrim’s home.

Walters describes this process as a mode of encounter between two subjects, not a selection by one subject (the pilgrim) of an object (the stone). Her interviews with pilgrims consistently frame the experience this way. One pilgrim she spoke with said: “When you come to this place and you begin pilgrimage, you start to see how God comes to you, how God speaks to you, in the river and in Shaligram. It’s a feeling I have so I think that is who will appear.”

The practitioner is not hunting. The practitioner is being met.

This has ritual implications. The Shaligram, once found, is not treated as a geological sample that has been acquired. It is treated as a divine guest who has agreed to accompany the pilgrim home. The journey back — down the Kali Gandaki, out of the valley, through Pokhara, onto a plane or a bus, into India, eventually into the household — is, for the tradition, a slow formal procession during which the stone is honoured as a royal visitor. Pilgrims keep the stone wrapped in clean cloth. They do not put it in their ordinary luggage. They carry it in their hands or close to their body. The stone travels with them in the manner that a deity would travel, not in the manner that a souvenir would travel.

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The politics of mobility

Walters’s subtitle — The Politics of Mobility in Nepal — points to the third and most contemporary dimension of her work: the recognition that the Shaligram tradition is, at present, under pressure.

Several forces are converging. Environmental pressure: climate change is altering the Kali Gandaki’s flow patterns, and glacial retreat is changing the mechanism by which Shaligrams emerge from the upper watershed. Walters’s recent publications, including pieces carried by the Associated Press and The Conversation, document that Shaligrams are becoming “rarer due to climate change.”⁶ Political pressure: the upper Mustang region is politically sensitive, bordering Tibet, and access to the riverbeds where the most significant Shaligrams emerge requires special permits that have become expensive and harder to obtain. Commercial pressure: a commercial Shaligram trade has emerged, with stones being removed from the river in large quantities by local traders and sold to pilgrims — raising concerns, in the tradition itself, about whether a commercially-acquired Shaligram carries the same spiritual weight as one personally found.

These pressures are not abstract. They affect the future availability of the tradition itself. If the Kali Gandaki ceases to produce Shaligrams — for reasons of climate, of politics, or of over-extraction — the Vaishnava tradition loses access to its foundational aniconic deity-object. The implications for householder worship, for the continuation of the lineage of ghar mandir practice, for the sampraday’s ability to initiate new generations of Shaligram worshippers — are significant.

Walters’s work documents these pressures carefully, neither sensationalising them nor downplaying them. Her writing gives the Vaishnava tradition access to a contemporary academic understanding of the threats to its practice — information that the tradition, operating primarily through oral and textual transmission, does not typically gather through formal research channels.

For the Bodha Retreat project, this documentation has direct practical value. It identifies, in specific terms, the stakes of the project’s mission. The Shaligram tradition is not secure. It requires active support: educational, economic, political, environmental. The Bodha Retreat’s commitment to bringing the memory of Mukti Kshetra back to the living awareness of the bhaktas is, in light of Walters’s documentation, also a commitment to sustaining the conditions under which the tradition can continue.

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Walters’s method and its limits

A responsible assessment of Walters’s work must also acknowledge its methodological boundaries. She is a cultural anthropologist, not a Sanskrit scholar. Her access to the Puranic textual tradition is mediated through translations and through the readings her informants present of the texts. Her field Sanskrit is functional, not expert. A properly thorough treatment of the Shaligram in the Puranic canon would require Sanskrit scholarship that Walters herself does not claim to possess.

She is also an outsider to the tradition. She is, by her own account, not Hindu. She is writing about a tradition from the perspective of a sympathetic observer, not from within its devotional practice. The phenomenological features of Shaligram worship that are accessible to a non-practitioner are necessarily a subset of what is accessible to a practitioner. A scholar who performs Shaligram puja daily has a different angle on the stone than a scholar who documents others performing the puja.

What Walters’s work represents, however, is something the Vaishnava tradition does not have in any equivalent form from within its own scholarly apparatus: a detailed, peer-reviewed, contemporary ethnographic documentation of how the tradition operates in practice, from the river to the household, across Nepal, India, and the diaspora, in the early twenty-first century. It is the kind of documentation that, historically, sampradays have not produced about themselves — because they have not needed to. The practice was the documentation. The generational transmission carried the tradition without requiring external ethnography.

In the current historical moment, this is no longer sufficient. The pressures on the tradition — environmental, political, commercial, demographic — mean that the tradition’s continuation depends, increasingly, on explicit advocacy, scholarship, and public communication. Walters’s work becomes, in this context, a resource for the tradition — an external attestation that sampradays and temple institutions can draw upon in their own work of cultural preservation.

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What the sampraday can learn

For a scholar-bhakta working from within the Swaminarayan sampraday, Walters’s work offers three specific points of learning:

First, vocabulary. Walters’s phrase “Shaligrams as kin” captures something about household practice that is present throughout the Vaishnava tradition but has not always been articulated in these terms. The recognition that the Shaligram is treated as a family member is, in the tradition, everyday. To articulate it as kin — as a sociological category — brings it into conversation with broader contemporary discussions of personhood, of non-human agency, of the ethics of objects. This is a vocabulary the sampraday can use in its own public communication, with scholarly support behind it.

Second, external verification. The Vaishnava tradition has been making the claim that the Shaligram is svayam-vyakta — self-manifest Vishnu — for two thousand years. It has done so without requiring any external confirmation. Walters’s work provides, for the first time, a form of external academic engagement that takes this claim seriously as a working ontology, rather than dismissing it as belief. This changes the conversational situation. A sampraday teacher presenting the Shaligram tradition to an audience that includes non-traditional Hindus, diaspora Hindus raised in secular environments, or interested non-Hindus can now reference Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas as a peer-reviewed academic source.

Third, documentation of what is at stake. Walters’s documentation of the environmental, political, and commercial pressures on the Shaligram tradition puts the tradition’s current precarity in factual terms. For the sampraday — and specifically for projects like Bodha Retreat that seek to communicate the significance of Mukti Kshetra to contemporary bhaktas — this documentation is invaluable. It makes clear that the mission is not merely devotional enrichment but cultural and environmental preservation.

The tradition does not need the academy’s permission to continue. It has never needed that permission. It has persisted through the rise and fall of empires, through modernity’s secular pressures, through migration and diaspora. Walters’s work does not grant the tradition its authority; the tradition already possesses it. What Walters’s work does is something different and, in a certain way, more useful: it provides the academic vocabulary with which the tradition can speak, if it chooses, to audiences that operate outside its own theological framework. For a sampraday engaged in the work of global communication — websites, reels, articles, diaspora outreach — this vocabulary is an asset.

The stones were always kin. Now the academy has written this down. The river has always been ancient. Now the geology confirms it. The ground has always held Vishnu. Now the ethnography documents the continuous presence of those who have worshipped him there. None of this is news to the tradition. But the vocabulary, newly available, enables a new kind of telling.

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Notes