William Crooke’s Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India

Record summary

William Crooke’s two-volume survey describes North Indian beliefs and practices concerning ghosts, wandering dead, possession, village shrines and spirits associated with violent or improper deaths. It is a strong discovery lead for nineteenth-century regional classifications of apparition claims and for comparison with later colonial and vernacular reports. Crooke’s categories reflect the questions and assumptions of ethnographic administration, and the book often generalizes across diverse communities. Researchers should trace the local informants, districts and cited customs rather than treating the survey’s labels as stable indigenous concepts.