Pāli Studies in Colonial Bengal: Bengali-Speaking Buddhists’ Strategy to Distinguish themselves from Hindus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article focuses on one of the core strategies used to decouple Buddhism from Hinduism in colonial Bengal. Capitalising on the nineteenth-century enthusiasm in Indo-European languages and public education, marginalised Buddhist minority argued that what Sanskrit meant for Hindus was Pāli for Buddhists to secure grant-in-aid for Pāli studies. With the assistance from Buddhists from Ceylon, they introduced Pāli weekly classes at village temples and primary, secondary, and postsecondary schools with Buddhist students in Chittagong. They convinced the colonial government to fund Pāli Departments at Chittagong College and at the University of Calcutta and more importantly to establish a ‘state scholarship for the scientific study of Pāli in Europe’ in 1915 that produced arguably the first indigenous Buddhologist. I contend that Pāli studies not only gave Bengali-speaking Buddhists access to modern education, but also enabled them to distinguish themselves from Hindus and emerge as a distinct religious community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".