I'm reading William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Some of the rituals he mentions are preserved on YouTube. Like theyyam dancing, where dancers travel from village to village, invoking the deities and taking prayer requests from the locals. And singing the epic of Pabuji, a medieval warrior from Rajasthan whom time and renown has promoted to godhood, in that region. The performers sing his story for nights on end, before a phad, an illustrated tapestry of the epic, which doubles as a portable shrine. In the media age, with fewer people keeping to the old ways, fewer people have time to devote to listening to the whole thing, and so this tradition is slowly dying out.
