Indian Religious Practices: a Selective Bibliography

India’s cultural heritage is rich and diverse due to its civilizational past. It is represented by thousands of monuments, temples and other works of art, such as paintings, sculptures and handicrafts found across the length and breadth of this country. Besides these tangible heritages are the less visible forms of cultural heritages, pertaining to oral traditions, aesthetic and religious beliefs, rituals and festivals, arts, music, folk traditions, dances, theatre forms, performing arts and narrative styles of storytelling. They are the insignia of the rich and diverse, multicultural, multi–linguistic cultural heritage of India. These are also called traditional expressions and include oral literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, costumes and crafts. Sometimes the cultural spaces, such as sites for storytelling, rituals and festivals, market places, where traditional cultural activities take place, are also included under the intangible cultural heritage.Quick and easy access to information is vital to the development of varies fields of Knowledge. Therefore, it is essential that relevant information be brought to the attention of the professional, administrators, and researchers who have urgent need of it. In this respect, bibliography plays an important role. There was a time in the past, when it was possible to a scholar to keep himself up to date and well informed on current literature in his field of interest. But due to the increase in the amount of literature available, it has become more and more difficult for him to do so. But for bibliography even a scholar faced with such a vast amount of literature would lose his way, wasting much time before he is able to read even a part of what he is required to study. Much has been written on the Religious practices, and the related fields and the references are many and distributed over numerous journals, monographs, memoirs, Internet database and other publications that are not easily accessible to research workers and the seekers of information. Keeping in view these facts, it has been considered useful to compile a bibliography available. This bibliography on ‘Intangible cultural heritage of India: a selected bibliography. Vol. I: Indian religious practices aimed at covering scholarly literature on concerned and related fields. We sincerely hope that this bibliography would be useful for Scientists, research scholars, Anthropologists, and other personnel related with this field.