TRADITIONS: TRANSMISSION OR INVENTION?

The research project 'Traditions: transmission or invention?
Systems of knowledge used and shared among Hindus and Muslims
in South Asia' will enquire into the observance or
discontinuity of traditions in India, and it will look at
models and modes of the transmission of knowledge in various
contexts -- literate and in 'popular' media, and whether the
knowledge is orthodox or not -- among both Hindus and Muslims
both today and in the past. 

By Jackie Assayag

More precisely, starting from fieldwork investigation,
research in archives, or the reading of texts, it will compare
'continuous' or 'discontinuous' models of tradition in order
to assess their relevance when applied to different contexts.
It will also evaluate potential or original combinations of
features, borrowed from one or the other model, which
complicate the functioning, use, and representation of the
social construction of tradition in particular cases that may
be observed or studied, such as reform movements, schisms, or
'returns to text'.

TRANSMISSION
The first model, which has a retrospective nature, presupposes
the existence of fundamental knowledge reproduced without
variation from generation to generation. It stresses the
permanence of what is transmitted and the homogeneity of those
who transmit it by implying that a conservative, hereditary
conception of individual and collective memory is at work;
nevertheless, this model is often also dominated by the idea
of a continual degradation of information over the course of
time.

INVENTION
The second model considers that old materials help to
establish invented traditions. It underscores such features as
the capacity to forget or the creative imagination more than
mechanical memory, and it assumes that in the play of
successive manipulations, imperceptible but repeated, an
innovative tradition is sometimes founded, so as to create a
perfect orthodoxy that is, however, unknown to tradition in
the hereditary sense.
In simultaneously comparing the content and mechanism of the
transmission of knowledge among Hindus and Muslims, it is
necessary to inquire into the relative importance of normative
religious traditions which are apparently exclusive, even
though they seem mobilized to display an affiliation to or
membership of a group endowed with an identity. In appropriate
circumstances the actual use of these traditions, however,
provides evidence  about cultural forms which have become
stabilized to a greater or lesser extent, and have been
constructed from crossovers, additions, superimpositions, and
innovations that also vary between castes, sects, 'schools',
and local, regional, or national traditions.

Dr Jackie Assayag is the head of the department of Social
Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry.