[3] Although intended for the British audience in India, as were numerous other such publications of the time, it was Indians who provided almost all of the content for the revised Notes and Queries format[4] that Sadhana Naithani believes demonstrates "the emergence and growth of that brand of ethnography for which Crooke should be better known and in which he differs from most other colonial ethnographers."
[3] Chaube became much involved in Notes and Queries and proved himself to be a methodical collector, collator and translator[5] whose specialism was local custom that was not recorded in Sanskrit works.
[1] He subsequently claimed to have assisted with much information in Crooke's Popular Religion and Folklore, which was first published in 1894, quickly sold out and was then re-issued as a two-volume revised and illustrated edition in 1896.
She notes this as an opinion shared by Shahid Amin, who had voiced it in his introduction to the Oxford University Press reprint of Crooke's A Glossary of North Indian Peasant Life, published in 1989.
[11] However, Christopher Bayly interprets the views of Amin differently, believing him to be saying that informants such as Chaube "... were simply providers of fact; they did not really influence the form of colonial knowledge.