Religion in India: A Historical Introduction

It is worth noting that the written records, whether they were ritual
manuals or stories of temple sites, owed not a little to “folk” or non-classical
sources. The a ̄gamas, for example, while they described what brahman priests
did (or should have done) in temple rituals, made allusions to rituals that
must have had agricultural or non-Vedic antecedents. These included,

The Post-classical Period 97

Map 3 India at the Close of the Ninth Century

Reprinted from A Cultural History of India, ed. by A. L. Basham (Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 589, by
permission of Oxford University Press.