Digital Rare Book:
Genealogy of the South-Indian Gods: A Manual of the Mythology and Religion of the people of Southern India
By Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg
Published in the original German text by Wilhelm Germann
Freely translated to English by G. J. Metzger
Published by Higginbotham and Co., Madras - 1869

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Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (10 July 1682 – 23 February 1719) was a member of the Lutheran clergy and the first Pietist missionary to India.

Under the patronage of King Frederick IV of Denmark, Ziegenbalg, along with his fellow student, Heinrich Plütschau, became the first Protestant missionaries to India. They arrived at the Danish colony of Tranquebar on 9 July 1706.

"Though the piety and zeal of Protestants had often excited an anxious desire to propagate the pure and reformed faith of the gospel in heathen countries, the establishment and defence against the Polish adversaries at home, together with the want of suitable opportunities and facilities for so great a work, combined during the first century after the Reformation, to prevent them from making any direct or vigorous efforts for this purpose."

Ziegenbalg brought Lutheranism and a printing-press to Tanjore court by ship. But what were the Danes already doing there? After an abortive excursion to Sri Lanka, where there was no room left to be conquered and seized, they made their way to Tranquebar circa 1620. Ove Gjedde who, in 1618, had commandeered the expedition to Lanka, initiated a treaty with the king of Tanjore to rent an area no more than "five miles by three in extent", resulting in the setting up of a fort, which still stands, though the Danes relinquished control of Tranquebar in 1845 to the British.

Printing and India found each other serendipitously. In 1556, a Portuguese ship bound for Abyssinia stopped in Goa to obtain provisions; the ship carried a printing press and 14 Jesuits, one of whom was João de Bustamante, the "Indian Gutenberg". The clergy in Goa hungered for the printing press far more vehemently than their counterparts in Abyssinia and, ultimately, the press was unloaded in Goa, and Bustamante stayed to set up the press at the College of St. Paul, a seminary that still exists.[citation needed]

The arrival of the first press in Goa was rejoiced at by St. Francis Xavier who had been preaching the gospel in Goa and in Tranquebar since 1542. Then inexplicably, and, significantly, all presses died out in India.[5] Tamil printing seems to have stopped after 1612. Records show that the last books in Latin and Portuguese were printed in Goa in 1674.

Ziegenbalg responded to the King of Denmark’s request for the bequest of a Christian mission to spread the vision of the Gospel in India, and, in 1706, Ziegenbalg and his colleague Heinrich Plütschau reached the region of Tranquebar, thus becoming the first Protestant missionaries to arrive on the Indian sub-continent and began their revisionary project. The two established the Danish-Halle Mission and laboured intensively, despite opposition from the local Hindu and Danish authorities in Tranquebar, baptizing their first Indian converts on 12 May 1707.

Education has always been an integral component of missionary work. Ziegenbalg recognized from the start the imperative of learning the local languages in the progress of their mission. Stephen Neill notes this curious serendipity:

"The original plan was that Ziegenbalg should concentrate on Portuguese and Plütschau on Tamil. For no explicit reason, but to the great advantage of the work, this arrangement was changed, and mastery of Tamil became the primary objective of Ziegenbalg.

He had little to help him. No grammar was available. The Jesuits in the sixteenth century had printed a number of books in Tamil, but the work had been discontinued, and the Lutheran missionaries seem never even to have heard that such printed books existed."[citation needed]

Ziegenbalg possibly spent more time picking up the local tongue than in preaching incomprehensibly and in vain to a people who would then have thought him quite remarkable. He went on to write, in 1709: "I choose such books as I should wish to imitate both in speaking and writing ... Their tongue ...(now) is as easy to me as my mother tongue, and in the last two years I have been able to write several books in Tamil..."

In the views of some Ziegenbalg was practising a well-intentioned form of cultural imperialism. But due to the circumstances in which European culture was established and promoted, in the midst of indigenous, alien people, the bridge estranging the cultural differences (amid Christianity and other cultures, the will to power promoted by a multiplicity of western nation-states, and also the friction between the fractions of the umbrageous faction of Christianity) posed many obstacles. This resistance circles our consideration back to the conflicting attitudes of the missionaries and the Hindus they sought to convert.

Classical Hindu views regarding religious and other pluralisms during this point in history are kind to our comprehension,though over times this abandoned dialogue between the two faiths has been spuriously revived by the likes of Ram Mohan Roy to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to Gandhi.[clarification needed]

Ziegenbalg was publicly critical of some members of the Brahmin caste, accusing them of disregard for lower castes in Hindu society. For that reason, at least one group plotted to kill him. This reaction by native Indians was unusual and Ziegenbalg's work did not generally encounter unfriendly crowds; his lectures and classes drawing considerable interest from locals.

In 1708, a dispute over whether the illegitimate child of a Danish soldier and a non-Christian woman should be baptized and brought up as a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, resulted in Heinrich Plütschau being brought before a court. Although Plütschau was released, Ziegenbalg wrote that "the Catholics rejoiced, that we were persecuted and they were authorized."

He connected this incident, which he took to have emboldened the Catholics, directly with a second nearly two weeks later, which resulted in his imprisonment. This incident arose from Ziegenbalg’s intervention on behalf of the widow of a Tamil barber over a debt between her late husband and a Catholic who was employed by the Company as a translator. The commander of the Danish fort in Tranquebar, Hassius, regarded Ziegenbalg's repeated intervention in the case, including his advice that the widow kneel before him in the Danish church, as inappropriate and sent for Ziegenbalg to appear before him. When Ziegenbalg demurred, requesting a written summons, he was arrested and, because he refused to answer questions, imprisoned.

Although released after a little more than four months, Ziegenbalg still had a difficult relationship with Hassius and that was one reason for Ziegenbalg's return to Europe in 1714-1716. Ziegenbalg was also married in 1716. He was active in cooperation with the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, making his work one of the first ecumenical ventures in the history of Protestant missionary work.

Neill suggests, "As a missionary of the Danish crown, ordained in Denmark, Ziegenbalg felt himself bound by the liturgy and customs of the Danish church (…) Only in one respect does [he] seem to have made a concession to the fact that this new church was growing up in India; he made use of the presence in the Christian community of a measure of literary and musical talent to introduce the singing of Tamil lyrics to Indian melodies, in addition to using in church the growing collection of hymns which had been translated from German but in which the original metres and tunes had been preserved."

Source : Wikipedia

Image:
Brahma
From Eugene Burnouff's book - 'L Inde Française Ou Collection De Dessins', published in 1827