The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India (Vol. 1 & 2) is a foundational ethnographic compendium of beliefs, rites, spirits, village deities, omens, festivals, and customary practices observed in northern India under late nineteenth-century colonial rule. Written in a lucid, taxonomic prose characteristic of Victorian anthropology, the work gathers oral traditions and ritual details into comparative categories, situating local Hindu, Muslim, and tribal practices within the wider study of myth, survivals, and popular religion. William Crooke, an Irish-born officer of the Indian Civil Service and a major contributor to colonial ethnology, drew upon administrative experience, linguistic familiarity, and extensive field observation in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. His career placed him in close contact with rural communities, informants, and vernacular traditions, enabling him to record practices often neglected by Sanskritic or elite accounts of Indian religion, though his interpretations remain shaped by the assumptions of his era. This two-volume work is recommended to readers interested in folklore, religious history, anthropology, and colonial knowledge production. It remains invaluable as a documentary archive of regional belief, best read critically: both for the richness of its collected material and for what it reveals about the methods and limits of early ethnographic scholarship.

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- A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes.
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William Crooke (1848-1923) was a British orientalist and a key figure in the study and documentation of Anglo-Indian folklore. In 1871, Crooke joined the Indian Civil Service. While an administrator in India, he found abundant material for his researches in the ancient civilizations of the country. He found ample time to write much on the people of India, their religions, beliefs and customs, having a burst of activity as a published ethnologist in the field. This began in the 1890s when Crooke's output in the field of ethnography was considerable, comprising the journal, two volumes of Popular Religion and Folklore and the four volumes that make up Tribes and Castes of the North Western Provinces.