Person · missionary & Tamil scholar
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg
Also known as Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg
The first Protestant missionary in India, landing at Danish Tranquebar in 1706. He learned Tamil thoroughly, set up the first press in India to print an Indian script, translated the New Testament into Tamil and wrote the Genealogy of the Malabar Gods — the first European account of Hinduism drawn from Indian informants and Indian texts.
- Date
- 1682 – 1719
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Tranquebar mission records; Genealogy of the Malabar Gods
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His mission board in Halle instructed him to convert heathens rather than study them, and refused to print the Genealogy; it stayed in manuscript for a hundred and fifty years. He died at thirty-six, having also argued that Tamil children should be taught in Tamil.
Connections (3)
- Monastic foundationTranquebar (Tharangambadi)
Ziegenbalg landed at Tranquebar in 1706, learned Tamil by sitting on the floor of a village school with the children, and had the first press in India capable of printing an Indian script working by 1712. Tamil types had to be cut, cast and recast, and the paper made locally. Every Indian-language press that followed is downstream of that workshop.
- TransmissionMadurai Meenakshi
Ziegenbalg's Genealogy of the Malabar Gods, written from Tamil informants and Tamil texts, is the first European account of Hinduism that treats it as a system worth describing accurately rather than as error to be refuted. His mission board refused to print it on the grounds that he had been sent to convert heathens and not to study them, and it stayed in manuscript for a century and a half.
- PrecursorSerampore & the Mission Press
Ziegenbalg printed the first Indian-language book on movable type at Tranquebar in 1713; Carey's press at Serampore, ninety years later and a thousand miles north, printed in forty languages and cut the first types for most of them. Both stood on Danish ground for the same reason, and Indian print culture begins in the one European territory too small to have a censor.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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