India has amongst the richest art historical legacies in the world, and a remarkable amount of this legacy is preserved not in museums but exists in India’s myriad villages and small towns. The role of popular culture in heritage preservation remains relatively unexplored in India, where much scholarship is organised around institutional or elite interests that overlook the living traditions and everyday usages through which much ancient material heritage comes to be preserved.

The book’s focus on popular culture and its resolute ethnographic approach makes an exciting contribution to contemporary debates on heritage. It raises pressing questions about heritage ownership and relationships of power, the making of heritage and the vital, yet unrecognised, role of popular culture in heritage preservation. The book takes as its focus Bihar but also explores the popular culture of adjoining northern India states.

Ruma Bose is an ethnographer, author and psychiatrist. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Calcutta and worked as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in London. Her ethnographic experience began with a postgraduate degree in medical anthropology from University College London in 2000. It was then that she developed an interest in archaeology and South Asian art history. She has written, researched and taught extensively on the subject of child and adolescent psychiatry, anthropology and ethnography. Her recent ethnographic publications include; Walking with Pilgrims: The Kanwar Pilgrimage of Bihar, Jharkhand and the Terai of Nepal (published by Routledge, 2019) and ‘Sultanganj Re-visited: Encountering the Past through Living Traditions’ (published by South Asian Studies, Cambridge, 2022).