Paratexts are a ubiquitous feature in any manuscript culture, and in premodern South-India they are one of the primary means, in fact often the only one, for attempting to trace transmission history. The word “paratext” may be understood, in this context, as a textual element that mediates and mirrors the relationship between a textual artefact in a manuscript and its environment, that is, the people who conceived, produced, and used it. Paratexts capture the threefold tie a manuscript has with time: firstly, with the time anterior to its production, when the text it carries was composed, secondly, the period when the individual manuscript was copied, and, thirdly, its more or less long history of storage and use. The word can be used as a cover term for a huge number of subcategories that partly overlap with literary sub-genres, which can be arranged by function or by position within the layout of a manuscript.