COLEBROOKE TRANSFERS MANUSCRIPTS FROM INDIA

First Essays on Jainism

For thirty years in India at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) was an administrator and a scholar with the East India Company. He is considered the founder of modern Indology and "the first great Sanskrit scholar in Europe". (1) He translated the two Sanskrit legal treatises, the Mitakshara of Vijnaneshwara and the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana.

Colebrooke embodies the passage from the crude designs attendant to eighteenth-century British expansion, to the transnational ethos of nineteenth-century scholarly enquiry. He joined the Company as a young writer (junior clerk) rising to the position of a member of the supreme council and theorist of the British Bengal government. His unprecedented familiarity with a broad range of literature established him as the leading scholar of Sanskrit and President of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He set standards for western Indology. 

Colebrooke's interests in India spanned a wide range of fields and disciplines, and he sought, in one way or another, to pursue them all. Consequently, he wore many hats. 

Even though like many scholars of the period, he was not really aware that Jainism is distinct from both Hinduism and Buddhism, he was one of the first Western scholars to point to the existence of a Jain tradition. While living in India, Colebrooke began publishing his wide-ranging research via the Asiatic Society of Bengal and was a founding member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland on his return to England in 1814. He dedicated the rest of his life to scholarly research, working from the large collection of original manuscripts and copies he had brought back from the subcontinent.

Colebrooke, pencil sketch

Born in London,  Colebrooke was the third and youngest son of Sir George Colebrooke, financier, MP from Arundale and Chairman of the East India Company from 1769. He was educated at home, proving a gifted pupil in mathematics and classics. (2) His mother Mary Gaynor, was the daughter and heir of Patrick Gaynor of Antigua. 

In 1782 Colebrooke was appointed through his father's influence to a writership with the East India Company in Calcutta, and worked in India for 33 years. Unlike many British people in India at this period, Colebrooke became very interested in South Asian culture and languages. He became a renowned Sanskrit scholar and an eminent expert on many aspects of Indian culture, including law, languages, literature, natural sciences and mathematics. In 1786 he was appointed assistant collector in the revenue department at Tirhut. He wrote Remarks on the Husbandry and Commerce of Bengal, which was privately published in 1795, by which time he had transferred to Purnia. He opposed the East India Company's monopoly on Indian trade through this article, advocating instead for free trade between Britain and India, which caused offence to the East India Company's governors. (3)

He was appointed to the magistracy of Mirzapur in 1795 and was sent to Nagpur in 1799 to negotiate an allowance with the Raja of Berar. He was unsuccessful in this, due to events elsewhere, and returned in 1801. On his return, was made a judge of the new court of appeal in Calcutta, of which he became president of the bench in 1805. Also in 1805, Lord Wellesley appointed him an honorary professor of Hindu law and Sanskrit at the College of Fort William. In 1807 he became a member of the supreme council, serving for five years, and was elected President of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta.

Typically of many British men working in India at that period, Colebrooke had three children with an Indian woman. Only one survived, who was sent to England for education (4). In 1810 he married Elizabeth Wilkinson. The marriage was short-lived and she died in 1814, shortly before they were due to sail back to England. He had three sons with Elisabeth Wilkinson but only Thomas Edward survived his father. He wrote a biography of his father, Life of H. T. Colebrooke (1873), with a bibliography listing his publications, as part of a reprinting of Miscellaneous Essays.

Colebrooke returned to England in 1814. He no longer had any official position but devoted himself to research, promoting knowledge of India and supplying materials to colleagues.

In 1816 he was elected to the fellowship of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1820 he was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He often chaired the society's meetings in the absence of the first president, William Herschel, and was elected as its second president on Herschel's death, serving 1823–1825. In 1823 he was also a founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, chairing its first meeting although he declined to become its president. (5) But he was the leading force for the foundation, contributing numerous articles to its Transactions.

The Collections of the Royal Asiatic Society contain correspondence and papers concerned with the founding of the Society and Colebrooke's tenure as the first Director; a number of books donated by Colebrooke; and some drawings of Indian agricultural implements, fishing nets, drinking vessels, containers, and musical instruments, also donated by him. The society also holds some of Colebrooke’s personal papers. Among them is a red calf-bound autograph book compiled by an unknown individual, but belonging to Swedish agriculturist Frederick Hendricks in 1893.

It contains printed and handwritten material including biographical information on Colebrooke, obituary notices for Indologist Horace Hayman Wilson, and correspondence from Colebrooke to Nathaniel Wallich, Superintendent of the Botanical Gardens, Calcutta. The correspondence concerns the sending of seeds, plants and geological specimens to both England and South Africa, and the sending of books and journals to India. 

The personal papers also contain photocopies of correspondence between Colebrooke and his niece, Belinda Sutherland Colebrooke, the elder daughter of George Colebrooke, Henry’s brother. After George’s death, Belinda’s mother took them to Scotland where she became involved in a series of affairs. Belinda, and her sister Harriet, were eventually made wards of court and placed with a foster mother, Mrs Lee. This series of 40 letters dates from 1816, when Belinda was 16 years old, until 1824. Belinda died in 1825 but not before she married Charles Joshua Smith, 2nd Baronet, in 1823. Henry Colebrooke took a keen interest in the girls’ lives and encouraged Belinda in her studies, suggesting books for her to read and a suitable language tutor. The letters reveal some of the complexities of the time concerning fostering and also the holding of political seats; alongside living in Scotland, Brighton, Worthing (atrocious!) and London.

His Pursuit of Knowledge

Colebrooke lived in India from 1783 to 1815, working for the British East India Company in various posts. Although he attained high rank in the legal, diplomatic, administrative and even academic spheres, his rise was not as straightforward as it may seem. His actions sometimes diverged from elements of company policy or the approach of the British government in London. His career came to an end after disagreements with the directors of the East India Company and he returned to England in 1814.

He worked differently from most other Europeans studying the culture and languages of India, in that he read the original sources in Sanskrit and discussed them with Indian pandits and scribes. 

Not having any knowledge of Indian languages beforehand, Colebrooke became interested in learning Sanskrit around 1790, when he was in Purnia, in north-eastern Bihar. This interest arose largely out of his curiosity about astronomy, algebra and other sciences that Indian thinkers had developed. His study of Sanskrit grew intense and finally became a central part of his public life, so much so that Colebrooke became widely acknowledged as a leading Sanskritist. His intellectual interests were very broad, demonstrated in publications on castes, ceremonies, languages, literature and philosophy, but also in mathematics, geography, geology, botany and crafts.

Colebrooke ‘developed into the leading expert of Hindu law and Sanskrit studies, concerns that were intertwined in colonial practice’ (6). Studying and codifying Hindu law and understanding its various schools were closely linked to its application in the courts in which Colebrooke worked as a judge. Practical matters connected to colonial work functioned as starting points for several areas of study, but Colebrooke’s intellectual achievements go far beyond this. Their scope and quality have led to comparisons with Indologist Sir William Jones (7).

From the start, Colebrooke surrounded himself with Indian traditional scholars –pandits – who provided him with original manuscripts or purpose-made copies of Sanskrit texts, whether grammars, lexica, law treatises and so on. Among them was the Bihari pandit Chitrapati, whom Colebrooke came to know in Purnia. He also employed two copyists whom he met in Mirzapur, called Ātmarāma and Bābūrāma (Rocher 2007). The three of them followed him to Calcutta. Colebrooke encouraged Bābūrāma to found a Sanskrit press in Calcutta but did not consult him on scholarly matters. He also recruited some pandits in Benares and later a Bengali pandit in Calcutta. In contrast with most Europeans of the period, Colebrooke valued the work of the ‘natives’ and believed that British servants of the East India Company should learn Indian languages, especially Sanskrit (8).

He collected plants in the Sylhet Division and sent plants and drawings to William Jackson Hooker and Aylmer Bourke Lambert. Colebrooke's botanical specimens are stored at Kew Gardens. (9)

Having become a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1792, Colebrooke became its very energetic president in 1807 and occupied this position until his resignation in 1814. He wrote 20 essays in its journal, the Asiatic Researches, including his first ever article, On the Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow in 1795.* Further, he initiated large-scale Asiatic Society projects of publications and translations of texts.

It was after eleven years' residence in India, Colebrooke began the study of Sanskrit; and to him was entrusted the translation of the major Digest of Hindu Laws, a monumental study of Hindu law which had been left unfinished by Sir William Jones. He translated the two treatises, the Mitakshara of Vijnaneshwar and the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana, under the title Law of Inheritance. During his residence at Calcutta, he wrote Sanskrit Grammar (1805), some papers on the religious ceremonies of the Hindus, and his Essay on the Vedas (1805), for a long time the standard work in English on the subject.

Vijnaneshwara was a prominent jurist of twelfth-century India. His treatise, the Mitakshara, dealt with inheritance and is one of the most influential legal treatises in Hindu law. Mitakshara is the treatise on Yājñavalkya Smṛti, named after a sage of the same name. Vijnaneshwara was born in the village of Masimadu, near Basavakalyan in Karnataka. He lived in the court of king Vikramaditya VI (1076-1126), the Western Chalukya Empire monarch.

The Dāyabhāga is a Hindu law treatise written by Jīmūtavāhana which primarily focuses on the inheritance procedure. The Dāyabhāga was the strongest authority in Modern British Indian courts in the Bengal region of India, although this has changed due to the passage of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 and subsequent revisions to the act. (10) Based on Jīmūtavāhana's criticisms of the Mitākṣarā, it is thought that his work is precluded by the Mitākṣarā. This has led many scholars to conclude that the Mitākṣarā represents the orthodox doctrine of Hindu law, while the Dāyabhāga represents the reformed version. (11)

The Dāyabhāga does not give the sons a right to their father's ancestral property until after his death, unlike Mitākṣarā, which gives the sons the right to the ancestral property upon their birth. 

Colebrooke broke the text of Dayabhaga into chapters and verses which were not in the original text and is often criticized for numerous errors in translation. Rocher believes the mistakes were due to three factors: (12)

1. The format of the Sanskrit texts
2. The texts were deeply involved with an ancient civilization, which the translators were not familiar with
3. The misconception is that the text was written by lawyers, for lawyers

Colebrooke created the division of two schools of thought in India, separating the majority of India, thought to follow the Mitākṣarā and the Bengal region, which followed the Dāyabhāga system.

Bust of Colebrooke

Instrumental in Colebrooke’s exploration of the culture and history of South Asia was his use of original texts, in the form of manuscripts. This is seen in his major intellectual contribution to the origins of Jain studies, Observations on the Sect of the Jains’, published in volume nine of the Asiatic Researches in 1807. Although some of his conclusions about Jainism were overturned by later scholarship, Colebrooke’s work was vital in bringing knowledge of the Jain tradition to a wider audience.

On 15 April 1819 Colebrooke officially presented his collection of Indian manuscripts to the India Office Library of the British government via the East India Company (13). The gift amounted to 2,479 items and Colebrooke continued to borrow them for his research. The famous sculpture of Colebrooke by Francis Chantrey was executed at the proposal of the East India Company directors as a gesture of gratitude and was to be placed in the library.

The holdings of the India Office Library were absorbed into the British Library in 1982. Chantrey’s bust of Colebrooke can be seen at the entrance of the reading room of the Asia and Pacific Collections, as they are known today. The presence of this vast manuscript collection ‘brought about a shift in venues for western Indological research’ (14), prompting scholars to visit London instead of the French National Library, as they had used to do till then.

The Colebrooke Collection forms a substantial element of the British Library’s holdings of Indian manuscripts and artefacts and continues to play a major role in the study of South Asia. Even though the Jain manuscripts were not identified as Jain at the time of donation, they comprise a large part of the Colebrooke Collection.

Colebrooke’s Jain manuscripts were obviously not identified as such in the preliminary categorisation done when the collection was donated to the India Office Library (15). They probably come under the general heading of ‘MSS. of all kinds’. They include an important selection of canonical and non-canonical Sanskrit and Prakrit works and an interesting set of texts written in Gujarati. Among noteworthy items of the manuscripts are:

• Kalpa-sūtra dated V.S. 1614, with the shelfmark I.O. San. 1638, which served as the basis of Colebrooke’s essay, Observations on the Sect of Jains
• Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna, a famous cosmological treatise in Prakrit, has the shelfmark I.O. San. 1553B.

Colebrooke specifically wrote about both these manuscripts in his 1807 article. He described the Kalpa-sūtra manuscript as "the most ancient copy in my possession and the oldest one which I have seen, [and which] is dated in 1614 Saṃvat: it is nearly 250 years old’'. (16)

It is fortunate that there is a surviving list, albeit incomplete, of Colebrooke’s Jain manuscripts in the form of a folio present in the India Office Library collection. The manuscript I.O. San. 1530 (E) lists 27 titles in the Devanāgarī script, accompanied by the number of pages in 22 cases. They correspond to manuscripts that are available today.

Jains and Colebrooke

He was one of the first Western scholars to write about jains in detail, providing information on Jain beliefs and practices that were largely unknown outside the subcontinent. 

Colebrooke’s writings on the Jains suffer from the beliefs standard among European scholars of the period. At one time he concluded that the Jains were a sect of Hinduism and later on he believed that they constituted a sect of Buddhism. Later scholars, particularly Hermann Jacobi, refuted these views.

He failed to distinguish between the languages favoured by the Jains for their scriptures and those used by the Buddhists for their holy texts. Colebrooke collected and copied large numbers of Jain manuscripts from a Jain individual who had converted to Hinduism. 

Two of the works he quotes in his 1807 essay are essential texts in Śvetāmbara Jain thought – the Kalpa-sūtra and the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi of Hemacandra. Colebrooke also refers to the key cosmological works of the Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna and the Lokanālī-dvātriṃśikā. 

Before Colebrooke, the information collected by Major Mackenzie on Jains came from the most authentic sources; two principal priests of the Jainas themselves. Dr Buchanan also had an authentic source, during his journey in Mysore, in the year following the fall of Tipu and Srirangapatna, in 1799, which ended the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and resulted in the East India Company‘s control of the Kingdom of Mysore. Mackenzie records: "Having the permission of Dr Buchanan to use the extracts, which I had his leave to make from the journal kept by him during that journey, I have inserted […] the information received by him from priests of the Jaina sect. I am enabled to corroborate both statements, from conversations with Jaina priests, and from books in my possession, written by authors of the Jaina persuasion. Some of those volumes were procured for me at Benares; others were obtained from the present Jagat Set, at Murshidābād, who, having changed his religion, to adopt the worship of Vishnu, forwarded to me, at my request, such books of his former faith as were yet within his reach."

But Colebrooke directly consulted fundamental works on the tradition. This method distinguishes his undertaking from those of Mackenzie or Buchanan, who wrote down information communicated by informants and pandits. Colebrooke begins the article on Jains by analysing historical-mythological information connected with Jainism on the basis of two works: The Kalpa-sūtra, the most widely circulated Śvetāmbara work. Written in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit, it provides data about the 24 Jinas.

The second is the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi of Hemacandra. This 12th-century lexicon is one of the most famous dictionaries of synonyms produced in Sanskrit. Hemacandra’s work broadly follows the same pattern as the Amara-koṣa, its most illustrious predecessor. Both lexicons share a large number of words and definitions, but the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi is clearly the work of a Jain; the Jain stamp is present in many ways. One of the most visible signs is the mythological information and the list of Jinas is found in the first section. (17) 

The result of introducing Hemacandra’s work was significant in that it revealed that Jainism had its own tenets and view of the world, which differed from other Indian religions. A lithographed edition of the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi was prepared under Colebrooke’s supervision and published in Calcutta in 1807 by his copyist Bābūrāma. The first edition was criticised for its numerous flaws. It also contained the homonymic lexicon of Hemacandra, his Anekārtha-saṃgraha.

Colebrooke in his essay, analyses combined information provided by both works about the 24 Jinas of the avasarpiṇī and other Jain mythological categories of their ‘Universal History’. There are 63 great men divided into the different categories of Jinas, Cakravartins, Baladevas, Vāsudevas and Prativāsudevas. He writes: "[Jinas] appear to be the deified saints, who are now worshipped by the Jaina sect. They are all figured in the same contemplative posture, with little variation in their appearance, besides a difference of complexion; but the several Jinas have distinguishing marks or characteristic signs, which are usually engraved on the pedestals of their images, to discriminate them." (18) Ages and periods of time as described in the Abhidhāna-cintāmaṇi are also dealt with (19).

Colebrooke then turns to an exposition of Jain cosmology, saying: "The Saṃgrahaṇīratna and Lokanāb-sūtra, both in Prakrit, are the authorities here used" (20). The Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna is a standard Jain writing on the universe, known in recensions of different lengths. It is concerned with Jain cosmography as well as with the results of karmas and the way they determine rebirths in the universe. The ‘Lokanāb-sūtra’ is usually known as the Lokanālī-dvātriṃśikā – Thirty-two Verses on the Tube of the World. Both texts are classics used even today in the Śvetāmbara monastic curriculum. Colebrooke also describes the three levels of the Jain universe – upper, middle and lower, various deities and continents of the world.

The essay ends rather abruptly with a discussion of Jain conceptions of the universe compared to those of the Hindus as expressed by Bhāskara.

Though Colebrooke’s accounts of various Jain texts are reliable, the conclusions about Jainism in his body of work cannot be accepted any longer. Colebrooke observes that the "Jainas constitute a sect of Hindus, differing, indeed from the rest in some very important tenets; but following, in other respects, a similar practice, and maintaining like opinions and observations." (21)

Colebrooke to Wallich

Twenty years later, in 1827, he gave a correct reading and translation of an inscription found on a stone slab showing the feet of Gautama-svāmī, in On Inscriptions at Temples of the Jaina Sect in South Bihar. Colebrooke noted that the slab was installed in 1686 of the Vikrama era (1629 CE) by a Jain family, at the instigation of the Śvetāmbara monk Jinarāja-sūri from the sect of the Kharatara-gaccha. While correctly observing that Gautama and Indrabhūti are the same person and refer to the first disciple of Mahāvīra he makes a mistake by assessing, "It is certainly probable as remarked by Dr Hamilton and Major Delamaine, that the Gautama of the Jainas and of the Buddhas is the same personage; and this leads to the further surmise, that both these sects are branches of one stock." (22)

In an article published the same year in the same journal, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, dealing with ‘Indian Sectaries’, Colebrooke writes: "The Jainas and Bauddhas I consider to have been originally Hindus, and the first-mentioned to be so still, because they recognised, as they [the Hindus] yet do, the distinction of the four castes." (23) This wrong notion does not prevent him from giving in the subsequent nine pages a fairly complete description of the main features of Jain doctrine, such as the nine principles (tattva), six substances (dravya), and eight main varieties of karma (karma-prakr̥ti). Colebrooke also indicates some of the differences between the two main Jain sects of the Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras.

Colebrooke was aware of the existence of the Prakrit languages, in which the Jain scriptures are mostly written. However, his assessment of the texts is hindered by his view that Jainism was an offshoot of Buddhism, a view generally shared by European scholarship. Colebrooke focused on the Prakrit languages in two articles published at a seven-year interval in the journal Asiatic Researches. In his essay in volume seven, published in 1801, Colebrooke mentions Māgadhī and Apabhraṃśa but does not take note of any relation of Prakrit languages with the Jains.

In the second article, however, which was published in volume ten in 1808, he makes use of the 12th-century grammar by Hemacandra, which describes Prakrit in its eighth book. He correctly observes that ‘specimens of it [i.e. Prakrit, are] in the Indian dramas, as well as in the books of the Jains’ (24). The essay, Observations on the Sect of Jains (1807) is largely based on Jain texts in Prakrit, but they are described as ‘'composed in the Prakrit called Māgadhī’' (25), which is incorrect. Canonical works such as the Kalpa-sūtra are predominantly in Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit while texts such as the Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna or the Lokanālī are in Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit. 

The holy texts of Buddhism are principally written in Pali. The ignorance in accepting the Buddhist and Jain traditions as different from each other also led to the inability to recognise the languages of their scriptures as distinct. Thus Colebrooke could write the absurdity, ‘'I believe [the Prakrit called Māgadhī] to be the same language with the Pali of Ceylon’' (26). This belief was probably further encouraged by the fact that Buddhists use the term ‘Māgadhī’ to refer to the original language of their scriptures. Unfortunately, even twenty years later, Colebrooke held the same position: "Both religions have preserved for their sacred language the same dialect, the Pali or Prakrit, closely resembling the Māgadhī or vernacular tongue of Magadha [in modern-day South Bihar]. Between those dialects [Pali and Prakrit] there is but a shade of difference, and they are often confounded under a single name". (27)

Such statements are no longer tenable. The correct position is: 1. Pali and the Prakrits are two different linguistic stages of Middle India. 2. Pali is the language of Theravāda Buddhist scriptures as they have survived. 3. Prakrits the Jains use are three: Ardhamāgadhī for the Śvetāmbara canonical scriptures, Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī for non-canonical scriptures and Jaina Śaurasenī for the Digambara authoritative scriptures.

The initial passage in the Observations on the Sect of Jains quoted gives valuable information on where Colebrooke obtained his Jain manuscripts. They were acquired in Benares and Murshidabad, and point to Colebrooke’s personal connections with prominent personalities, easily explainable through the high administrative positions he held and his scholarly reputation.

Murshidabad, a town in the north of Calcutta, was the home of several Jain families from Rajasthan who had emigrated for economic reasons in the 18th century. They form the Marwari community. The Jagatseths, whom Colebrooke has mentioned, are one of those families, described as ‘the Rothschilds of India’ (28). Colebrooke mentions the Jagatseth member who converted to Hinduism and thus did not need his Jain books any longer. He describes the convert as "The representative of the great family of Jagat-śeṭh, who with many of his kindred was converted some years ago from the Jaina to the orthodox faith’ (29). This individual is Harakh Chand, who died in 1814. He was the first of the family who abandoned the Jain religion and joined the [Hindu] sect of the Vaishnavs. He was childless and extremely anxious to have a son. He faithfully followed all the ceremonies enjoined by the Jain religion in such a case but with no result. At length, a member of the Vaishnav sect advised him to propitiate Vishnu. He did so and obtained his desire. […] He and his successors have been respected as much as before by the members, of their old religion. In fact, it is doubtful whether the members of this family ever renounced entirely their Jain religion (30).

Few of the manuscripts Harakh Chand gave to Colebrooke have colophons indicating where they could have been copied. It is likely that some of them were copied in Rajasthan and carried by the family to eastern India, with the Jagatseths probably commissioning others after they settled near Calcutta. 

______________________________________

1. Former Fellows of The Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002, Royal Society of Edinburgh. p. 194.
2. Lane-Poole, Stanley (1887). "Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (DNB00)." In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
3. Ibid
4. Rocher Rosane and Rocher Ludo, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. Routledge, 2012. p 117

5. Herbert Hall Turner. "The Decade 1820–1830". History of the Royal Astronomical Society 1820–1920. pp. 11, 18–19.

6. Rocher and Rocher, 33

7. Gobrich, Richard, Theravåda Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. Routledge, 2004, p 5

8. Rocher and Rocher,198

9. Desmond, Ray, ed. (2002). "Colebrooke, Henry Thomas". Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists Including plant collectors, flower painters and garden designers. CRC Press. p. 702.

10. Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra, (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1975), Volume I, Part II, 703.

11. Rocher, Jimutavahana's Dāyabhāga: The Hindu Law of Inheritance in Bengal, (Oxford University Press, 2002), 23.

12. Rocher, Jimutavahana's Dāyabhāga: The Hindu Law of Inheritance in Bengal, (Oxford University Press, 2002), 35.

13. Rocher and Rocher, 139

14. Ibid, 139, 140

15. Rocher and Rocher, 145

16. 1807 essay in Asiatic Researches, p 313

17. I, 24

18. 1807 Essay, Asiatic Researches, p 304

19. Ibid, 313

20. Ibid, 318 n. 2

21. Ibid 288

22. 1827 article, Asiatic researches, p 520

23. Ibid, 549

24. 1808 article, p 393

25. 1807 article, p 310

26. Ibid, 310 note

27. 1827 article, p 521

28. Ibid, 549–550

29. Little, J H, House of Jagatseth, 1920, Calcutta Historical Society, part 2: 104–105

30. Ibid

Note: I am indebted to Nalini Balbir's article, Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the Jain Tradition, in Jainpedia. 

* Max Muller has said that this essay is not original, but a literal translation from Gagannatha's Vivadabhangarnava. (Chips from a German Workshop, vol 2, p 34, footnote). But this article is in fact the third chapter of A Digest of Hindu Law.

© Ramachandran