Essay:
The study of cultural encounters in Tharangampadi (Tranquebar) and Other Essays
By Esther Fihl and Stine Simonsen Puri
Published in Review of Development & Change - 2009

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The present volume of Review of Development and Change takes the reader to the small coastal village of Tharangampadi, literally ‘the village lashed by the waves’ and known as Tranquebar in European discourse. Located in the Nagapattinam district of Tamilnadu, its unique history as a former Danish trading post, site of foundation of the first Lutheran church in India and the cradle of the Indian print history makes this village a privileged setting for the study of cultural encounters. In the past Tranquebar was the locus of interesting encounters related to colonial politics as well as missionary activity.

Tranquebar is situated on the Coromandel coast which derives from the Tamil term Cholamandalam, ‘realm of the Cholas’, known to have been the rulers of most of South India between the ninth and twelvth centuries. Since the early fourteenth century, at the time of the Pandyan Kingdom, Tranquebar has been known has also been known for its Siva temple, Masilamaninathar, which bears inscriptions referring to the place as a trading port with merchants and soldiers stationed for their protection. During the Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646), the place, with its location close to Tanjore (Thanjavur), was part of the Tanjore Province, which in 1535 was granted independence with the rule of the Nayaks lasting until 1673 (Subramanian 2003 p. 2ff).

The colonial history of Tranquebar begins in 1620 with the arrival of the Danish envoy Ove Giedde on the Coromandel coast as the head of the first Danish trading expedition, with the hope of signing a contract between the Danish King Christian IV and the King of Tanjore, Nayak Ragunatha. After some months of negotiations, the Danes were allotted Tranquebar and along with the already present Portuguese given a monopoly on all Tanjore’s trade with Europe (Fihl in this volume).

Assisted by the Dutch merchant Roland Crappe, who became the first Danish governor of the trading station in Tranquebar, Giedde founded Fort Dansborg, which served as the residence for the governor and other officials (Hjelm 1987; Subramanian 2003). From here silver, lead and guns were exchanged for Indian textiles and pepper. For the Danes, Tranquebar was a military stronghold and it functioned as a warehouse for commodities acquired also at other Indian localities and at places in Southeast Asia. In 1845, the trading post was sold to the British (Feldbæk 1969; Fihl 2008).
For the use of Tranquebar as a trading post, the Danes paid a yearly tribute to the Tanjore king thereby becoming part of a complex political system in South India based on reciprocal exchange of gifts and tributes between princely states (Fihl 1984). By the early nineteenth century, between 1808 and 1815, however, Tranquebar was occupied by the British military as a consequence of the wars in Europe. This complicated the payment of the tribute, which was of great symbolic and political importance for the Maratha King of Tanjore at that time, Rajah Serfoji II. Whereas the British saw the payment purely as an economic transaction, for the king of Tanjore, it was a matter of prestige and a symbol of his power (Rastén in this volume).

During the reign of Ragunatha (1612–1634) and in the following centuries, Tanjore court was a centre for performing arts, and it patronized the devadasis, female dancers serving at temples not only in Tanjore, but also in larger towns such as Tiruvarur, forty kilometres south-west of Tranquebar, where an important devadasi temple was located and from where dance steps as well as dancers were exchanged with the Tanjore court (Kersenboom-Story 1987). There were devadasis in Tranquebar as well. In 1623, an Icelander, Jon Olafsson, serving the Danish king in Tranquebar for a year as a soldier, observed temple dancers during processions outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansborg, where he was on guard. Olafsson’s notes of recollection are a unique historical source on the dance, which after Indian independence has been declared one of the national classical dances and through which today young women of various backgrounds, can encounter the dance of the devadasis as a method of crosscultural understanding (Puri in this volume).
The first protestant church was founded in India in 1706, and happened to be located in Tranquebar. The Danish King Frederik IV had in that year sent two German missionaries from Halle, Bartholomæus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau to Tranquebar in order to establish a Lutheran mission among his Indian subjects (Gross, Kumaradoss and Liebau 2006). The missionaries soon found themselves to be in deep conflict with the Danish officials and traders sent by the Danish trading company and who, besides when it came to trading activities did not invest much time in taking part in the daily lives of the local Indians (Nørgaard 1987). The Danish– Halle mission, however, put much emphasis on social work and cultural understanding (Fihl 1988, Jeyaraj 1996).
Some years after their arrival in Tranquebar, the Lutheran missionaries set up a print station. At this print station, the first full translation of the Bible in Tamil was printed, which was the first translation of the Bible in any Indian language. The first Tamil grammar and dictionary books were also issued by the Danish press, which constitute a landmark for both future Tamil literacy and modern European understanding of Indian cultures (Venkatachalapathy 2003). For the early missionaries, the printing press became a new way of approaching the Tamil people of not only from Tranquebar and but also from much further beyond (Venkatachalapathy in this volume).

After the establishment of the Lutheran church, many different Christian protestant churches followed and spread out all over Tamilnadu (Bugge 1994). There was fierce competition among the various Christian denominations, and by 1845, when the Danish trading post was sold to Great Britain, the congregations had mostly been taken over by the Anglican Church. In this context, the newly formed German Lutheran Leipzig Missionary Society made an effort to proselyte among the Anglican Christians as well as among the Roman Catholics in the Madras Presidency, with a more accommodating attitude towards the caste traditions. Thus, the Anglican and the Lutheran church tried to gain influence among the local population by adopting different strategies. One was to accept the caste system, the other was to reject it, and in doing so, both sought legitimacy by referring to the praxis of the first missionary in Tranquebar, Bartholomæus Ziegenbalg (Schönbeck in this volume).

Image:
Religious procession with Danish flags and colonial officers, late 18th or early 19th century in Tranquebar.

Credit: Maritime Museum, Denmark.