Introduction

This work situates the significance of understanding veneration at popular shrines. It has been argued that in absence of rigorous studies on religion outside the purview of state or textual studies, Indian historiography hasn’t significantly contributed toward understanding of popular shrines. There is also an absence of methodology to understand popular veneration beyond dominant tropes and prevalent metonyms, which are continued imprints of colonial discourse that perpetuated the construction of religious boundaries. This chapter explores connected histories of popular religious traditions in Punjab and argues that, in the absence of methods, popular shrines have remained outside historical discourse, sometimes negatively classified as fake and fictitious. It argues that any nuanced understanding of ‘connected’ and ‘everyday’ histories cannot leave aside ‘lived’ and ‘organic’ domains of cultural processes.