{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029142857142857144, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010285714285714285, 'mean_word_length': 4.798013245033113, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Ahmad Rijaluddin's Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala. Edited and translated by C. Skinner. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982. Maps, Appendices, Bibliography. Paperback.

Ahmad Rijaluddin, the author of the above-mentioned "Narrative of the State of Benggal", visited Calcutta in 1810 in the company of Robert Scott, a partner in the Penang firm of Forbes & Scott. He was born about 1770 and lived in Penang, where, as Skinner says, he seems to have acted as translator, interpreter and language teacher to the European mercantile community. He belonged to a South Indian Muslim family settled in Malaya for more than one generation and was sufficiently assimilated to the Malay environment to be acceptable to the British as "native" secretary, translator and teacher of Malay. In this quality he had many things in common with his younger but more widely known colleague Abdullah Abdulkadir Munshi, who served Raffles after the latter's arrival in Malacca in 1811. In spite of the fact that people like Ahmad Rijaluddin and Munshi Abdullah were born in Malaya, had a good command of Malay, had done a good deal of reading in traditional Malay literature and acted as clerks and language teachers, we should never forget that they cannot be classed as Malays. They had their own ethnic identity: Tamil or Arabic or a mixture of the two and they were proud of it. This means that, as far as the 19th century Malay society is concerned, they were marginal men, both culturally and linguistically, and this also explains why they, almost naturally, sought to cooperate with and to depend on the British. As ambitious, well-assimilated but non-integrated citizens they formed a natural "trait d'union" between the British masters and their Malay subjects.