In this volume we, the authors, honour and celebrate, individually and collectively, the work of Gananath Obeyesekere, one of the most inspiring and provocative anthropologists of our time. Professor Obeyesekere's work, prolific by any standards, covers a wide range of subjects and crosses disciplinary boundaries. It nevertheless falls within two broad academic areas, anthropology and Asian Studies. With the exception of two papers, this collection consists of Asianist work from different disciplines — Anthropology, Religion, Sociology, History, Art and Languages.

In the course of his long and distinguished career, Professor Obeyesekere has accumulated a very large number of students, friends and colleagues, making the task of editing a collection like this both easy and difficult, easy because there is no scarcity of willing and eager contributors, and difficult because of the practical considerations of limiting the collection to a manageable size. Coherence was another issue. While it is desirable to have a collection of essays focussed on a single theme, that choice brings along with it the question of what the theme should be, and the constraint to leave out eager contributors merely because their chosen topic does not come within the bounds of the selected theme. For this reason I decided to ask our contributors to write on any subject of their choice. When the contributions arrived however, it was possible to bring about a degree of coherence by grouping them into categories that evoked different areas of Professor Obeyesekere's wide-ranging work.