This book presents a multidisciplinary study of the processes through which regions and regional consciousness get formed and maintained in India. The fourten essays brought together here examine various modes through which people in different parts of India express, create, and foster a sense of their area as a distinct, coherent, and significant unit to which they belong in some important way. The modes examined include language, oral and written literature, festivals, pilgrimages, everyday rituals, domestic wall-calendars, caste identity, religious identity, and political movements. The contributors to the volume belong to a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.