The pañcāṅga is eaten, the siddhānta is kept

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Every locality in pre-print South Asia needed a fresh calendrical almanac every year, produced by the thousands for immediate use — plausibly the highest-volume written genre of the subcontinent. Yet consumables do not enter archives: an expired pañcāṅga is waste palm-leaf, while the theoretical works used to compute it are durable capital, taught and recopied for centuries. The manuscript record must therefore contain a spectacular structural inversion — near-total absence of the most-produced genre alongside abundance of its theory — and the size of that inversion measures, for the first time, the gap between production and preservation for ephemera generally. If it holds, every argument from absence about practical writing (letters, accounts, school exercises) inherits a calibrated correction factor instead of a shrug.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue, manuscripts of astronomical theory and computation manuals (siddhānta, karaṇa, table instructions) will outnumber actual year-specific pañcāṅga or ephemeris documents dated before 1800 by at least 10 to 1, despite the latter's annual production in every locality. Primary clause: the at-least-10-to-1 theory-to-ephemeris ratio among pre-1800 items; the claim is about the ratio, not mere rarity.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue jyotiṣa holdings partitioned into theoretical works versus year-specific calendrical documents; the partition cross-checked against work records in the Pandit database.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The ephemeral-consumable vs durable-capital contrast (expired pañcāṅga = waste; siddhānta/karaṇa recopied) follows directly from known usage, but quantifying the theory-to-ephemera ratio (>=10:1 pre-1800) as a calibrated correction factor for arguments-from-absence is un-run.

'Panchangam' (Wikipedia) — annual almanac computed from siddhānta/karaṇa jyotiṣa
Plofker et al., 'Calendars, Rituals, and Astral Science in India' (ORCA/Cardiff)

Predictions

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