This collection of essays is meant to explore the various forms that the theme and the notion of ‘tradition’ took within the South Asian context, during ancient and pre-colonial periods.

Designed by the editor to cover a significant selection of the specialized fields of knowledge that shaped classical South Asian cultural history, the aim of this volume is to offer a stimulating anthology of papers on the different and complex processes employed during the ‘invention’, construction, preservation and renewal of a given intellectual tradition.

In this regard, the contributors have expertly analysed a large variety of aspects, namely the transmission of traditional canons —both textual and practical—, the dynamisms and the strategies chosen for the renewal of a tradition, its internal and external dialectics, the procedures of its legitimation, the theoretical and pragmatic mechanisms of its survival, the criticisms of traditional knowledge systems, etc. Attention has also been paid to problems related to the primacy exercised by highly specialized traditional experts, to monopolies in the transmission of knowledge, to its means of cultural and political justification, and to the connections between a specific traditional field of knowledge and the surrounding social arena.

Hence the following essays, thematically arranged according to a sixfold partion (see, supra, the table of contents), are dense and rich in scholarship and I hope they will notably contribute to the contemporary Indological understanding of the crucial institute of ‘tradition’.