William Crooke

Born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1848, William Crooke was educated at Trinity College Dublin and joined the Indian Civil Service in 1871. Much of his career was spent in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, where close contact with local communities shaped his lifelong interest in popular religion, customs, and oral tradition.

Crooke became one of the best-known early writers on Indian folklore and ethnography. His best-known works include Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India and The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. He also served as an editor of the journal Folk-Lore, helping connect scholarship on India with wider debates about myth, custom, and belief.

He retired from India in the 1890s and continued writing and editing in Britain until his death in 1923. While his work reflects the assumptions of its colonial period, it is still widely read for the amount of material he gathered and preserved.