The Shaligram Museum of Baglung

The Shaligram museum at Kundule of Baglung District in Nepal might not appear to be a museum in the generally expected sense of the term. Flanked by a temple and two ashrams (the Muktinarayan Temple, the Muktinath Vedavidyashram, and the Tirupati Balajidham respectively), the museum itself is actually a 100-meter-long trident-shaped underground tunnel sculpted on each end to resemble a tiger. Inside this tunnel are then a series of tiered glass cases containing over 1.2 million Shaligram Stones, the sacred fossil ammonites of the Himalayas.

For more than two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites (an extinct type of cephalopod), called Shaligrams, has been an integral part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout Nepal and India. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, in the Kali Gandaki River Valley of Mustang, ritual use of these stones today has become a significant focus of pilgrimage, religious co-participation, and exchange throughout South Asia and among the global South Asian Diaspora.

Viewed primarily as natural manifestations of the Hindu god Vishnu, Shaligrams are considered to be inherently sacred not only because they are not man-made but because the workings of the landscape (i.e., the processes of geological formation) has imbued them with a living essence and agency of their own. For this reason, Shaligrams require no rites of consecration or invocation when brought into homes or temples as presiding deities over the family and the community. What this means in other words, is that the gods do not come to inhabit them, they are them.

Shaligrams are also deeply intertwined with understandings of divine movement, either through a geologically and mythologically formative journey down the sacred river, or transnationally in the hands of devout pilgrims. Pouring out into the river each year following the summer melt high in the mountains, Shaligrams are gathered up by pilgrims, tourists, and merchants alike. On their way out of the mountains, they travel through forests and cities, into temples and homes, across great expanses of time and space, carried by the indescribable forces of nature or the complex networks of pilgrimage and kinship exchange that eventually come to define their lives as gods and as family members.

Therefore, unlike broadly Western views of fossils as culture-less geological formations better approached by paleontological science, Shaligrams in Nepal are distinctly understood as cultural heritage. But cultural heritage in Nepal remains a contentious issue because the problem is never more salient than when it comes to what exactly is labeled as “cultural” and what is thus in need of preservation. In Euro-American contexts, the extraction of fossils is often viewed as a pursuit that is relatively outside of ethnic or national heritage because fossils are generally not considered to be cultural objects (at least, not as governments tend to define the term). Conversely, fossil protections, in many jurisdictions, tend to be because fossils are considered the property of the state or province and part of an overall national geo-heritage — and not only just at special sites.

This contention has then led directly to the Shaligram Museum project in Baglung, which was largely paid for by crowd-funding initiatives and government grants that raised nearly 100 million rupees. Named after the late Swami Sridharacharya, who was active in preserving Shaligrams and promoting their religious significance, the museum opened only about a year ago but has already become an important stop on the larger Annapurna Shaligram pilgrimage circuit, seeing roughly 50 to 100 visitors per day during peak season.

The Shaligram museum of Baglung is thus truly unique in the world of museums and cultural preservation. Even Nepali President Ram Chandra Poudel, who visited the museum shortly after its inaugural opening in December of 2023, drew connections between the creation of the museum-temple complex and nation-wide environmental conservation efforts in the Himalayas by equating the protection of Shaligrams with the concurrent need to protect the Kali Gandaki river they come from, along with the high mountain peaks and shale beds that produce them.

For the museum enthusiast, or even just for those interested in the many differences between people’s understandings of what culture is and what it means between South Asia and the West, the Shaligram museum in Baglung is worth note.

Holly Walters

Dr. Holly Walters is a cultural anthropologist and lecturer in anthropology at Wellesley College. Her ethnographic work focuses on Shaligram (sacred ammonite) practice in Nepal, in India, and among the global South Asian Diaspora. Her previously published work includes her first book, Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) as well as a second book on Shaligram interpretive practice (TLS, 2024). She also has multiple article publications on ritual and divine personhood in South Asia discussing topics such as fossil folklores, deity darshan, digital Hinduism, and robot ritual performance.