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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.
Jokhaiya, who had by the same enumeration eighty-seven thousand worshippers, was a Bhangi or sweeper, who is said to have been killed in the war between Prithivî Râja of Delhi and Jaychand of Kanauj. He has a noted shrine at Paindhat in the Mainpuri District, where a sweeper for a small fee will kill a pig and let its blood drop on his shrine.