After discovering my first shaligram, I could find little that described its cultural, mythological, or religious significance until I discovered an entertaining old glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases called Hobson-Jobson, the second edition of which was published by two British colonial scholars in 1903. From a few quotes they collected from notations in obscure writings, some as early as the 16th century, I read that a shaligram is "A pebble having mystic virtues… usually marked by containing a fossil… often adopted as the representative of some god… considered a representative of Vishnoo… found in the Gunduk River," and – most alluring – "it is the only stone that is naturally divine; all others being rendered sacred by incantation."
Beyond such curious ramblings and speculative rumours, however, little else about the shaligram pilgrimage was available to a larger readership until, in recent decades, a few of us anthropologists and others began to write a little more about them.