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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.
Lastly comes the house roof. We have already seen that the Drâvidian tribes will not allow their women to touch the thatch during a whirlwind. So, most people particularly object to people standing on their roof, and in a special degree to a buffalo getting upon it. It is on the roof, too, that the old shoe or black pot or painted tile is always kept to scare the Bhûts which use it as a perch.
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