




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 3 (2): 161–168, July 2020 

 
SPECIAL SECTION: New Epistemologies of Water in India  
 

Revealed by Water, Hidden in Water: Indic Hydro-
epistemologies of Sacred Things 
 

Anway Mukhopadhyay  and Anuradha Choudry  
 
Abstract: This essay explores two basic trajectories of the hydro-epistemology of 
sacred things in Indic cultures: things revealed by water—the visible gifts of 
water—and things hidden in water with which we can communicate only indirectly, 
by touching the water. Unlike Mircea Eliade’s concept of hierophany, this 
represents a mode of the sacred that cannot be auto-manifest and depends on 
water for radiating its sacrality. While the sacred things revealed by water—the 
conch shell, the bana linga, the svarnamukhi shila, the shaligrama shila—are water’s gifts 
to the Indic religions, there are things that are hidden by water; their hiddenness 
maintains their secrecy and sacrality. For instance, in certain Sati pithas, the petrified 
body parts of Goddess Sati are said to remain submerged in water. One can only 
touch them indirectly, by touching the water that is in touch with the Sati’s body. 
This article illustrates this two-pronged epistemology of the sacred that is propelled 
by water in Indic religious cultures. 

Keywords: Hydro-epistemology, Sacrality, Indic, Sati Pithas, Hierophany 

 

1. INTRODUCTION 

When we set out to explore the hydro-epistemology of sacred things in 
Indic traditions, we found two basic trajectories: things revealed by the 
water—gifts that dot the boundary between nature and culture—and things 
hidden in the water that we can touch only indirectly, by touching the 
water. Sacred things from the water include the conch shell (Hinduism and 

                                                           
 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur 

721302, India; anwaymukhopadhyay@gmail.com.  

 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur 
721302, India; panditanu@gmail.com. 

Copyright © Mukhopadhyay and Choudry 2020. Released under Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.228  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.228


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [162] 

Buddhism), the bana linga, the svarnamukhi shila, and the shaligrama shila 
(Hinduism);1 these are the gifts of water to Indic religions. There are also 
other sacred tokens that the water hides; their concealment ensures or 
enhances their sacrality. For instance, in various Sati pithas (sacred sites of 
Devi worship associated with her avatar, Sati), petrified body parts of 
Goddess Sati are said to be submerged in the water, thereby making the 
water sacred. One cannot directly touch these hidden tokens from the Sati 
myth; one can only touch Sati indirectly by touching the water in which the 
petrified flesh of Sati is hidden. This article illustrates this two-pronged 
epistemology of the sacred that is induced by water in Indic religious 
cultures. 

 

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS 

We find that Mircea Eliade’s concept of ―hierophany‖ is not adequate to 
account for the phenomena on which we focus in this article. While 
Eliade’s idea of ―hierophany‖ focuses on the self-manifestation of the 
sacred, the gifts of water revealed by its waves, as well as the sacred things 
hidden in its bosom, represent a mode of the sacred that is not and cannot 
be auto-manifest and rather depend on water for its location and function 
within the epistemology of the sacred. Eliade (1959) opines, ―Man (sic.) 
becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as 
something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of 
manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany‖ (11). 

In this article, however, we argue that in the case of waterborne sacred 
objects or those hidden in water, the sacred does not manifest or show itself. 
Instead, the water shows or refuses to show it. When unseen, it is still 
considered sacred; indeed, its sacredness is grounded in that it remains 
hidden by the water. On the other hand, when it is seen, it does not show 
itself but is revealed by running water that drops it on the shore. Here, 
hierophany does not refer to the agency of the sacred itself, but rather the 
agency of the mother of sacred things: water.  

In order to explore specific forms of water-induced spirituality prevalent in 
various Indic modes of religiosity, we draw and elaborate on Bron Taylor’s 

                                                           
1 Bana linga—also known as svayambhu (i.e., self-born) linga is an ellipsoid stone that Hindus 
worship. The stone symbolizes Lord Shiva, the supreme god of power in the Hindu Trinity 
(Brahma–Vishnu–Maheshvara). The stone is commonly found on the bed of the Narmada 
River in Madhya Pradesh, India. Svarnamukhi shila is the natural stone obtained from the 
Svarnamukhi River in Andhra Pradesh and it represents Shakti/Devi. Shaligrama shila, 
collected from the Gandaki River in Nepal, is a fossilized shell worshipped as a 
manifestation of Lord Vishnu. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_river
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_river
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_river
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhya_Pradesh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India


[163] Anway Mukhopadhyay and Anuradha Choudry 

(2014) idea of ―sea spirituality‖. While speaking of ―sea spirituality‖ in the 
context of surfing, Taylor dwells on the ocean as the source of life—
―Mother Ocean‖. According to Taylor, ―there is not much we know with 
certainty about the origins of life other than that the ocean is literally the 
source‖ (230). This we can say without having a clue why a spirituality that 
evolved in close contact with the sea developed not in isolation from the 
senses but rather through them. This sort of ―sensible spirituality‖, Taylor 
insists, ―celebrates the energies of the universe and life itself‖ and ―does not 
require metaphysical speculation that reaches far beyond our ken‖ (230).  

The mode of religiosity on which we focus in this article is sensory in 
nature: one has to touch the holy stones revealed by water and blow the 
conch shell, a gift from water, by pressing one’s mouth to its mouth. 
However, the trajectory we follow is different from that of Taylor’s on sea 
spirituality. While the surfer, as a sea spiritualist, rides a wave and in doing 
so connects to the ocean (Taylor 2014, 230), the spiritualist or religious 
person who worships sacred stones or blows the sacred conch shell 
ritualistically hears the roiling sea or the laughter of the river in the conch 
shell or sacred stone, respectively. Thus, the sea spiritualist moves closer to 
the sea; this happy recipient of the gifts of water waits on the shore for the 
water to reveal, with maternal affection, her enormous riches.  

 

3. REVEALED BY WATER 

Sacred things have various connotations and functions in Indic religions. In 
Hinduism, where the spectrum of the sacred is bafflingly wide and all-
pervasive, the sacred thing is often not just a thing, but a manifestation of 
the divine itself. For instance, the bana linga, shaligrama shila, and svarnamukhi 
shila are all natural objects that are seen as varied manifestations of the 
divine. Even though one might be tempted to associate their sacrality with 
the Eliadean idea of ―hierophany‖, we need to first look at their origins. 
Water is a primordial mother, the manifester of sacred objects, and the 
bringer of sacred gifts to the people who love and are loved by it; to find 
the sacred stone, you must go to the river. However, we need to consider 
here that water in general, not just rivers, is the mother of gods. Water 
brings sacred gifts—the stony manifestations of the divine—to the shore, 
which simultaneously separates and connects nature and culture; thus, 
religion begins its course.  

The stone’s sacrality is essentially embedded in, and curiously coterminous 
with, the sacrality of the water that carries it. In this context, we can see the 
water, carrying the sacred stones that are to be worshipped as 
gods/goddesses, has the palpable, physical presence of the Vedic Aditi who, 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [164] 

as Tracy Pintchman (1994) observes, ―shares her maternal nature with the 
waters and the earth‖ (32–33). Pintchman says, ―Aditi, the waters, and earth 
may on some level be different aspects of one another, for they are 
homologized by being cited collectively as mother of the gods‖ (32–33). If 
we dissociate the rivers carrying these sacred stones from the complex 
mythological frames that may occasionally downplay the primacy of ―water 
as mother‖ and see the jalatva (water-ness) of the river water as the actual 
source of the sacrality of the divine stones nurtured in the riverbed—that is 
to say, if we train ourselves to read the sacred differently and non-
conventionally, from a physical or tangible perspective—we come to 
understand how important it is to acknowledge and appreciate the power of 
water to bring the gods as its gifts to us.  

As Shrikala Warrier (2014) rightly observes, all the bana lingas in the 
Narmada River are said to be Shiva himself. Warrier reminds us that the 
five main deities of Hinduism, foregrounded in the Panchayatana2 worship 
initiated by Shankaracharya, ―are worshipped in the form of stones found in 
five sacred rivers‖ (140–141). Interestingly, these stones are also associated 
with the five primordial elements of creation in Hindu cosmologies—ether, 
air, fire, water, and earth. Nevertheless, even though these five sacred 
stones are supposed to represent the five primordial elements, including 
water, it is water that nurtures and carries them to the religious Hindu. 
Water, in a way, becomes the all-encompassing entity that manifests the 
sacrality of all the elements, in effect becoming the ultimate agency behind 
the hierophany of the five sacred stones. These five stones are born of 
water and are manifested as sacred entities (not just ―things‖) through its 
flow. Here, we come to the spiritual dynamics of water revealing rather than 
hiding the sacred. The hydro-epistemology of the hierophany of these 
stones becomes comprehensible to us when we adopt Taylor’s (2014) 
framework of ―sensible spirituality‖ and touch the heart of the sacred 
epistemes of popular Hinduism in their simplest forms, shorn of the 
scriptural superstructure that, when over-emphasized, often smothers 
unadorned nature.  

Eliade (1959) explains that for the religious person, ―the sacred is equivalent 
to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality‖ (12). However, in the case of 
sacred things brought by water to the domain of religion, true power and 
reality are in water itself. While the bana linga or the shaligrama shila may be 
seen as svayambhu (self-born), in the final analysis, they are the offspring of 
water. The maternal agency of water cannot be overlooked, when a non-

                                                           
2 Panchayatana refers to the veneration of the five Hindu deities: Shiva, Vishnu, Shakti/ 
Parvati, Surya, and Ganesha.  



[165] Anway Mukhopadhyay and Anuradha Choudry 

biased ―contemplative cultural critic‖ (Mani 2009, 1–4), capable of 
overcoming an obsession with scriptures, touches these sacred stones with 
love and reverence and hears in them the laughter of waves. Kapila 
Vatsyayan (2010), while discussing sacred stones like the shaligrama shila and 
bana linga in the context of Indic water myths, focuses on the ecological 
message that ―these simple stones‖ convey, which facilitates ―a sensitive 
comprehension of ecology‖ (xiv). Indeed, by worshipping these stones, we 
celebrate the primordial motherhood of water. It is in the water as a 
physical matrix that different ideas and figurations of the sacred take shape. 
As the origin of all sacrality, water weaves a complex web of the sacred by 
revealing certain things and hiding others.  

From the sacred objects that are considered direct manifestations of the 
divine, we now move to those tokens of the sacred that do not 
ontologically overlap with the divine, but are nevertheless associated with it 
or have other sacred functions. Take, for example, the shankha (conch 
shell). As Gautam Chatterjee (2001) elaborates, the conch shell ―symbolises 
the cosmic space of which the attribute is sabda or sound‖ (77). While the 
sacred stones representing the five deities are gifts from the rivers, the 
conch shell is a gift from the sea. However, its relationship with the sea is 
quite complex—the sea, as it were, remains alive within the physical body 
of the shell. ―Like the insides of the sea, conch-interiors are considered 
innately sacred, and devotees adorn their entire physical and spiritual selves 
and homes by using its internal parts‖ (Sarbadhikary 2019, 7). Even though 
the conch shell has many sacred functions in Hindu rituals, ―the conch’s 
sacrality rests with the object’s naturalness, not ritual value‖ (Sarbadhikary 
2019, 8). In other words, it is a natural gift from the sea.  

Following Sarbadhikary’s (2019) insistence that the conch shell, ―when 
sounded every dusk‖, makes ―the home open out to the sea again‖ (8), we 
can say that it is a peculiar gift from water that opens our hearts to the sea 
and to the ultimate abundance of water. Drawing on the view that the 
shankha always reminds us of ―nature’s innate freedom‖ (Sarbadhikary 
2019, 8), we argue that water gives us the conch shell to help us recognize, 
again and again, its source in primordial waters when we hear the sound of 
the sea emerging from its cavity.  

In Tibetan Buddhism, the conch shell is a ―symbol of the proclamation of 
the Buddha’s teachings, which fearlessly resounded throughout the ten 
directions‖ (Beer 2003, 171). Once again, we find in the conch shell, which 
is a gift from the rolling waters of the sea, the cadence of the waves. The 
sacred gifts that come to us from water cross the boundary that separates 
nature and culture; thus, we understand that culture is, in the context of the 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [166] 

hydro-sacred, not a process of transcending nature but one of celebrating 
its gifts.  

 

4. HIDDEN IN WATER 

Now, we shall focus on the ways water hides sacred objects and invites the 
religious person to touch the water—this is the only way to access what is 
hidden underwater: the unrevealed sacred. Here, the secret and the sacred 
become one. Water preserves the sacrality and secrecy of the hidden object, 
forcing us to understand that water is not just a matrix of sacred stones, but 
also a medium for communicating with that mode of sacredness that revels 
in its inaccessibility. Here, you do not dive into the water to find or grab the 
sacred object; you simply touch the water or take a dip in it, without 
presumptuously trying to discover the sacred thing hidden in the water. In 
certain Sati pithas—sacred spots where lie hidden parts of the corpse of 
Goddess Sati, dismembered by Vishnu’s chakra after her self-immolation 
and the destruction of the yajna arranged by her father, Daksha 
(Mukhopadhyay 2018, 10–11, 7–681)3—one recognizes this phenomenon 
of water hiding the sacred beneath its surface. Sati’s sacred body parts, in 
petrified form, are hidden in the water, out of reach. One can only touch 
the water, take a dip in it, or sprinkle it on one’s body; it is only by touching 
the water that the person, indirectly, accesses the sacred aura of the 
goddess’s petrified body parts and pays tribute to them. In these cases, one 
cannot directly touch the body of the goddess; one’s respectful touch must 
be mediated by water. In the case of tantric Shaktism, there are many 
ritualistic contexts in which touching the goddess becomes an important 
way of paying tribute to her and being blessed by her touch. Touch is 
mutual—whatever you touch also touches you, especially within the 
panentheistic vision of tantric Shaktism (Williamson 1984, 253–254). 
However, in the case of the sacred body parts of Sati, hidden by water, the 
sacred touch, although mutual, is mediated. You touch the water that is in 
touch (literally) with the sacred body parts of Sati, and the water touches 
you back, on behalf of the goddess. Just as with the revelation of sacred 
objects, in the case of hiding sacred objects too, water enjoys the agency of 
ensuring the sacred function of those objects.  

In the Sati Pitha of Kankalitala, adjacent to Shantiniketan in the district of 
Birbhum, West Bengal, there is a kund (a small water body) beside the 

                                                           
3 Chakra or Sudarshana Chakra is the divine discus that is the weapon of Vishnu. Yajna is a 
ritual that is performed in front of a sacred fire and is accompanied by chants (mantras). It is 
part of the ancient Indian tradition and has been referred to in Vedic literature (especially the 
Brahmanas and the Yajurveda). 



[167] Anway Mukhopadhyay and Anuradha Choudry 

temple of Goddess Kali. According to legend, Sati’s waist fell here and is 
still submerged in this water body (Clark 2011; Devasharman 2015, 100). In 
a piece on the Sati Pitha of Kankalitala, William Clark (2011) expresses 
wonder about the invisibility and inaccessibility of Sati’s actual body part at 
this site:  

I cannot help but wonder if at the bottom of the kund there may be some sort 
of rock formation corresponding to the fallen body part of Ma Sati. It seems 
likely that an isolated, shallow pond such as the Kankalitala kund would 
periodically dry up during periods of draught, exposing the bottom. If and 
when this does occur, is an object revealed that was the initial source of 
attraction for ancient people to this sacred site, or is the Kankalitala kund 
merely a pond that has acquired sacred status for reasons unknown? 

However, as Yatinandan Devasharman (2015, 100) points out, the kund at 
Kankalitala never actually dries up fully. Even during the summer, when the 
entire Birbhum district reels under scorching heat, this kund remains full. 
According to legend, it has a subterranean connection with the Manikarnika 
Ghat of Varanasi. Devasharman informs us that devotees of the goddess 
consider the water of the kund to be as holy as that of the Ganges. They 
convey their secret desires to this kund and, when their desires are fulfilled, 
they place sweets and paper boats on the surface of the water. They sprinkle 
the water on their heads while expressing their desires and sip the water. In 
other words, for the devotees of the goddess, the water of the kund is alive; 
it listens and responds to their pleas. The water is precious because it is the 
only medium of communication with the sacred part of Sati’s corpse that is 
submerged in it. The devotee conveys their plea to the petrified body part 
of Sati, and the response comes through the water. They have to touch the 
water to convey their heart’s desires to what is hidden in it; the benediction 
of the sacred remains of the goddess are also conveyed through the water. 
Without loving the water and being loved by it, you cannot engage in a 
loving relationship with the feminine divine enshrined in this Sati pitha.  

In the context of sacred objects hidden by water, another example would be 
Lake Manasarovara, which is famous as one of the holiest and most 
important Hindu pilgrim spots. According to the myths of Shaktism, Sati’s 
right hand fell into the Manasa Sarovara, which is now located in Tibet and 
is called Manasarovar (Devasharman 2015, 191–194). While for Hindus in 
general the water of this lake sacred in itself, the Shakti worshipper 
experiences this sacrality from a different perspective. Here too, Sati’s body 
part is submerged in the Manasarovara—it is not accessible. Only water 
remains before the eyes and hands of the devotee. The Shakti worshipper 
conveys the message of devotion to the goddess only by touching the water 
of the lake, which keeps Sati’s petrified hand hidden beneath its surface.  



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [168] 

5. CONCLUSION 

We have shed light on those sacred functions of water in Indic traditions 
that often escape our critical gaze. While Indic water epistemologies 
typically focus on the sacrality of water itself (Vatsyayan 2010, xiii–xviii), we 
have underlined the intricate ways in which water determines the 
epistemology of the sacred in India. Rather than being an apparently 
passive, abstract instance of the sacred, or an object of worship, water 
engages in active play with the very epistemes of sacrality. It conditions, 
modulates, and determines the modalities of the manifestation (the sacred 
objects it reveals) or non-manifestation (the sacred things it hides) of the 
sacred things that are at the heart of the religious cultures of India. Whether 
it reveals or hides them, the agency lies in the waves and ripples of the 
water.  

 

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http://www.kalibhakti.com/kankalitala/
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010053

