Place · Danish port & mission town · India

Tranquebar (Tharangambadi)

/t̪aɾaŋgambaːɖi/

Also known as Tranquebar press / Tamil printing

Date

1712–1800

Function

Trade & production

Patron dynasty

Danish colonial / mission

Condition

historic printing landscape

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

11.029, 79.850

Connections (11)

• CampaignWandiwash (Vandavāsi)

  Wandiwash in 1760 ended French ambitions on the Coromandel, settled between two European companies on Indian soil with armies that were mostly Indian. Tranquebar, Danish and neutral, went on printing Tamil books through the whole contest — Ziegenbalg's press had been working there since 1712 — which is a reminder that the smaller European settlements survived precisely by not competing.

• Early print networkSerampore & the Mission Press

  Ziegenbalg set up a Tamil press at Danish Tranquebar in 1712 and Carey a Bengali one at Danish Serampore in 1800, and both worked under a Danish flag precisely because the East India Company would not allow missionary printing in its own territory. Between them they produced the first movable-type printing in Tamil and Bengali, the first Indian newspapers in those languages, and the grammars and dictionaries the whole nineteenth-century apparatus of Indian language study was built on.

• Site adjacencyNagapattinam

  Nagapattinam and Tranquebar are fifteen kilometres apart on the Coromandel and were neighbouring European enclaves — Dutch Nagapattinam from 1660, Danish Tranquebar from 1620. Ziegenbalg's Tamil press worked under the Danish flag at one while the Dutch ran a fortified trading town at the other, and Nagapattinam had already been the Chola empire's principal port six centuries earlier, with a Buddhist vihara endowed by a Srivijayan king.

• Monastic foundationBartholomäus Ziegenbalg

  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.

• Craft tradition ofThalassery

  Gundert at Thalassery and Ziegenbalg at Tranquebar did the same work a century apart on two coasts: learn the language properly, compile a dictionary and grammar nobody had written, start a newspaper, and leave behind the standard in which the language is now printed. Malayalam and Tamil lexicography both begin at a mission station.

• Trade routeMachilipatnam kalamkari

  Block-printed cotton from the Coromandel — chintz — was the single largest manufactured export of the seventeenth-century world, and it changed what Europeans wore: washable, colourfast, printed cloth at a price wool and silk could not meet. England banned its import in 1700 and 1721 to protect domestic weavers, which is a reasonable measure of how completely Indian printing had taken the market.

• Trade routeBalasore (Baleshwar)

  Tranquebar on the Coromandel and Balasore in Odisha are the two ends of the early Danish trade: cloth bought in the Tamil country, rice and saltpetre in the Bay's northern roadsteads, and both shipped from the same anchorages as the English and Dutch. Denmark's Indian commerce was never large enough to need a monopoly, so it survived by working other companies' coasts.

• Trade routeKozhikode / Calicut

  The Danish Asiatic Company opened a Calicut lodge in 1752 to buy pepper direct rather than through Coromandel middlemen, running it from Tranquebar. It closed about 1791 as Tipu Sultan's wars made the Malabar coast unworkable — a small neutral buyer squeezed out by a conflict between Mysore and the Company that had nothing to do with Denmark.

• Power passed toFort St George, Chennai

  Denmark sold Serampore to Britain in 1839 and Tranquebar with the continental factories in 1845, the negotiations conducted with the Madras government; Tranquebar became a taluk of Tanjore district. The last European competitor left India by treaty and for cash, without a shot, twelve years before the rebellion that ended Company rule altogether.

• Imperial administration ofNakkavaram / Nicobar Islands

  The Nicobars were administered, when they were administered at all, from Tranquebar: settlers, missionaries of the Moravian Brethren and supply ships all went out from the Coromandel fort. Malaria killed most of them. A Danish warship sent from Tranquebar in 1783 was also what persuaded the rival Austrian colonists on Nancowry to give up their claim.

• Patronage networkThanjavur Maratha palace

  Tranquebar's lease came from Thanjavur and its rent was paid to Thanjavur for two centuries, through the Nayaka dynasty and then the Marathas who displaced them in 1674. Serfoji II, the Maratha raja educated by the Tranquebar missionary Schwartz, built a library at his palace, subscribed to European science and had Danish-printed Tamil books in it.

On these journeys

• Early modern ports & companies
• The printing revolution in India
• Danish India — 1620 to 1868
• Mission, print and the school

Sources

Mission press histories; British Library and scholarship on early Tamil print.

• Wikipedia