History, asked by saloni1081, 1 year ago

character sketch of henry thomas colebrooke

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Answered by manishkr620520
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British administrator-scholar, Henry Thomas Colebrooke (15 June 1765—10 March 1837) was a leading scholar of Sanskrit and a founder of Western Indology. He spent over 30 years in India, working for the East India Company and becoming familiar with many different aspects of South Asia. 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 1815. He dedicated the rest of his life to scholarly researches, working from the large collection of original manuscripts and copies he had brought back from the subcontinent.

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, entitled 'Observations on the Sect of the Jains', published 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.

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