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Noah's Ark at Serfoji's court
A FAR-SIGHTED KING Raja Serfoji II
I recently bumped into two scholars from abroad with a common interest, Raja Serfoji II (1777-1832) of Tanjore, and both I met through the Roja Muthiah Research Library. Savithri Preetha Nair was from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Indira Viswanathan Peterson is a Professor at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. And both were looking for more material on the polymath Raja's connection with the Pietists from the Danish Halle Mission in Tranquebar. Personally, I thought both should be talking more to each other than to me.
Nair considers Serfoji as the best example in South India of what Francis Bacon described as the "enlightened pursuit of useful knowledge", the Indian equivalent of the Pietists of Germany and Joseph Banks, that leader of the English Enlightenment. Getting him interested in this search for knowledge while a boy in Madras were the German missionaries Christian Frederick Schwartz and Wilhelm Gericke, who taught him mathematics, geography and economics, the surgeon John Anderson who introduced him to anatomy, sericulture and horticulture, the `Orientalists' Colin Mackenzie and Francis Whyte Ellis who offered him the riches of the Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, and Governor Lord Robert Hobart who advised him on the Western social graces. When as an adult he returned to Tanjore in 1798, all these influences led him to establish in the palace complex, libraries, a museum, printing presses, pharmacies and medical facilities, educational institutions, gardens and a menagerie.
That menagerie fascinated that great Tanjore Christian poet Vedhanayagam Sastri whose Nanattacca Natagam (The Drama of the Divine Carpenter) includes a section on Noah's Ark. According to Peterson, in one of her several papers on Serfoji, both the Raja and Sastri wrote long, didactic poems, which expounded on cosmography, astronomy, natural history and geography. Two of them, curiously with similar sounding names, were Serfoji's `Fortune-teller Play of the King of the Gods' ( Devendra Kuravanji) in Marathi and Sastri's `The Fortune-teller Play of Bethlehem' ( Bethlehem Kuravanji) in Tamil.
Another paper of Peterson's discusses Serfoji's two-year pilgrimage to Benares (1820-1822) which she says "entailed not only visits to sacred places and acts of piety, but the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, visits to the British administrators and European printing presses and shipyards, and the collection of natural history specimens for scientific research." More than a pilgrimage, it was an exploration of India, a study tour of what the country had to offer and a look into governance and administration.
Peterson's other interest is a Sanskrit text (c.1800) called Sarvadesavilasa, which she urges me to get a translation of. This anonymous work, she tells me, is a veritable picture of late 18th Century Madras, discussing its leading Indian citizens, talking of the various public cultural performances in the city, and describing a topography that's virtually what's shown in the map of 1798.
S. MUTHIAH
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