H. H. Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal

Record summary

H. H. Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal contains entries on religious practices, death customs, village deities and spirit-related beliefs across Bengal. It offers identifiable nineteenth-century descriptions for researchers studying how reports of ghosts, possession and dangerous dead were recorded in administrative literature. The material is useful for comparison but is not an anthology of verified incidents: many entries summarize informants, earlier publications or the author’s own classificatory assumptions. Local names and communities should be checked against Bengali-language sources and later historical scholarship.