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
8 - Ashes and Immortality: Death and the Digital (After)Life
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
When a Shaligram dies, it begins a new journey: either cremated in the hands of the dead or handed down to the next generation. As such, the ever-present issue of mobility foregrounds both the life of a Shaligram and the lives of practitioners. In an age of ever-increasing diaspora and digital life, however, keeping up with changes in communities and families living abroad has been a significant challenge for those maintaining Shaligram practices. As a result, many Shaligram devotees are growing concerned that millennia of Shaligram traditions are now in danger of extinction. But there is hope yet, especially in the burgeoning platforms of digital religion and the entrance of Shaligrams into the Dark Net.
Keywords: digital religion, death, commodity, mobility, diaspora
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
− Haruki Murakami“If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it's not really obvious where we would be.
So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.”
− Evgeny MorozovThe Death of Shaligram
After leaving Mustang for the final time in the spring of 2016, I returned to Kathmandu along with a family of Shaligram pilgrims to their home in the bustling streets of the city center. I had done this many times before, but this particular trip carried a note of finality to it I had not expected.
This would be my first experience with the death of a Shaligram brought about by the death of a friend. Like many of the pilgrims at Muktinath, the Bhandari family had lived with and cared for Shaligrams for generations, attending to their “births” during pilgrimage to the Kali Gandaki, caring for them throughout their lives in the household, and now conducting their funerals at the edge of the river. But this was more than just a symbolic funeral for an aged deity: it was an actual funeral for a beloved father.
Shrouded by thick billows of smoke, I stood on the cremation grounds of Pashupatinath temple with a mixture of discomfort and solemnity. Parul Bhandari, the elderly father of Tanuj Bhandari, had passed away two days prior and now lay at the edge of the ghat , wrapped in saffron blankets and surrounded by his deeply mourning family.
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- Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas , pp. 233 - 256Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020