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A systematic survey of popular religious beliefs and folk traditions across northern India, tracing how nature spirits, village and heroic godlings, disease deities, and cults of the sainted and malevolent dead shape rural practice. The author compiles customs, legends, rituals and local cultic forms, highlights the assimilation of major deities with indigenous practices, and documents magical usages and everyday superstitions. Organized in thematic chapters, the study blends ethnographic observation with citations and examples to reveal patterns of worship, the roles of ritual specialists, and the social functions of these popular cults.
Vâlmîki, the author of the Râmâyana, is worshipped in the same way. He has shrines at Bâlu in the Karnâl District and at Baleni of Meerut. Baliya, the headquarters of the district of that name, is said to be called after him. The Aheriyas and Baheliyas, both hunting tribes of the North-Western Provinces, claim descent from him, and he has now, by an extraordinary feat in hagiolatry, become identified with Lâl Beg, the low caste godling of the sweepers.41