Collection of papers from a 1999 conference on topics like: the pandit as a private scholar, university teacher, public intellectual or legal adviser; traditional ways of Sanskrit teaching and learning; the relevance of traditional Sanskrit grammar for the learning of Sanskrit; the prestige of Sanskrit and the social standing of pandits; the special guru-shishya-relationship; the relationship between pandit and professor in academic systems; and life histories of some well-known pandits such as Krishnashastri Chiplunkar, Hazari Prasad Dvivedi, Gopinath Kaviraj, V.S. Apte and others.