T HIS paper is the product of a course in Ethnological Field Techniques given in the graduate Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. In 1944-1945 work was carried on with a Bengali Mohammedan, Abdul Rahaman, who comes from a village in the district of Sylhet, northeastern India. He has been several times to the Assam hills which lie north of Sylhet and he has some knowledge of Calcutta from which he left India ten years ago. Beyond this, his life in India was spent within the confines of his local district. Although Mr. Rahaman's English was picked up after he left home, it is adequate for communication. The course was limited to nine students and the data presented here are compiled from notes taken in joint session and in individual work with the informant. The techniques employed in the collection and organization of ethnological materials are emphasized in the course even at the expense of the accumulation of data so that work with the informant is interspersed with lecture and discussion sections. Interviews with the informant, therefore, did not total more than about seventy hours. The course also emphasizes field data as opposed to those areas of inquiry better investigated by other means so that data are presented here with a minimum of reference to written sources. As a matter of fact, sources of information on small Indian communities are practically nonexistent. There are libraries of books which generalize on Islam and shelves of books on the Taj Mahal, but little or nothing on the details of life in a Bengali village. This paper is not a total description of life in any village but it contains information that is not available in other sources. The greatest care has been taken to exclude all data which were felt to be either doubtful or inconclusive. Other data obtained at the same time have been omitted from this paper because of lack of space. When so much can be obtained so quickly and with such little expense it indicates the wealth of anthropological material lying unused at our back doors. Each of the members of the course wrote a rough draft of some portion of the material, but the project has been so consistently a joint enterprise that it is difficult to assign responsibility for any part of the manuscript and equally difficult to claim authorship of the whole. I should like to name as co-workers Martin W. Ackerman, Edgar C. Cardose, Helen Codere, Helen B. Henry, Robert N. Hill, Eleanor B. Leacock, Dorothy Leadbeater, Estelle Sillen and Helen Vryonis. All of us wish to extend our friendly gratitude to Mr. Abdul Rahaman.