History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c81.222

v6.c81.222

It must be emphasized here that this section is concerned with the vratas described or mentioned in *works on Dharmaśāstra*. Even so the number of vratas is extremely large. No attempt is made here to include all *vratas* observed by women or by primitive tribes or by the illiterate people all over India or contained in works written in the several regional languages such as Bengali, Hindi or Marathi The inclusion of such observances would entail an enormous amount of labour, would expand the work to huge proportions and would be beyond the proper scope of the History of Dharmaśāstra Further, to tabulate all the vratas and festivals of all common people and to study the folk life of villagers, forest-dwellers and mountain inhabitants in the States of the continent of India would be beyond the capacity of a single worker and would require the co-operative effort of a large team of workers spread over years When done, that work would be a monumental one on the social anthropology of India In this connection I may mention Prof B. K. Sarkar's work 'Folk element in Hindu culture' and the paper on 'a study of vrata rites in Bengal' contributed by Mr S. R Das¹⁴⁵ to 'Man in India' (1952) vol. 32, pp 207-245. Some writers have already published works dealing with the observances of common people such as Mrs Stevenson's 'Rites of the twice-born', Underhill's 'Hindu religious year', B A. Gupte's 'Hindu holidays and ceremonials', R. C Mukerji's 'Ancient Indian fasts and feasts', Mr. Rigvedi's Marathi work on 'History of Aryan festivals' (ed of 1924) In these books (except in the last and rarely in Underhill's) texts from Dharmaśāstra are generally conspicuous by their absence.