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Remembering Ziegenbalg
SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg
The week ahead will recall the arrival in India 300 years ago of Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and the significant contribution he and his fellow Pietists made to India and, particularly, to South India. Ziegenbalg, of the Danish Halle Mission to Tranquebar (Tarangambadi), was the first Protestant missionary to arrive in Asia with a mandate for missionary activity. But being a Pietist, one of those 17th Century Lutherans who pioneered a search for Enlightenment at home and abroad, Ziegenbalg and his successors made a greater success of becoming Tamil scholars, spreading and acquiring knowledge, and introducing the achievements of the New World to the Old than in the pursuit of strictly focussed missionary activities.
They were an honoured roll call of German missionaries, Ziegenbalg and Plutschau and Grundler in Tranquebar, Schultze and Gericke, Fabricius and Breithaupt in Madras, Schwartz in Tanjore, Kiernander in Serampore and many others. But it was Ziegenbalg who showed them the way. Quickly becoming a Tamil scholar, he spent as much time translating Tamil wisdom as he did the Old and New Testaments. After printing had died out in India by the end of the 17th Century, he reintroduced it in Tranquebar, where he set up a printing press and ink and paper manufacturing units in 1712-14. And he offered Europe insights into such Indian knowledge as Ayurveda, Astronomy and Hindu Philosophy. Looking back on his contribution, printing was perhaps the most significant part of it, for it was after those beginnings that Serampore helped Carey, Marshman and Ward to spread the word throughout India and the rest of Asia.
The commemoration of Ziegenbalg's arrival in India will begin on July 2 with the inauguration at the Roja Muthiah Library, Taramani (near the M. S. Swaminathan Foundation), of a weeklong pictorial exhibition organised by the Francke Foundation, Halle, on Ziegenbalg's life and times. The Foundation, founded in 1698 by a Lutheran theologian and educationist, August Hermann Francke, a contemporary of Ziegenbalg, has today one of the largest collections of South Indian artefacts in Europe as well as the largest collection of papers on the Mission in Danish Tranquebar, which, curiously, was from the first manned by Germans. The formal tercentenary celebrations of Ziegenbalg's arrival will get under way on July 3 at the Gurukulam Lutheran Theological College, Kelly's. The highlight of the inauguration will be the release of a stamp commemorating Ziegenbalg and the handing over to the Gurukulam of the microfilms of all the Indian written material now held by the Francke Foundation. This material will be of immense value to researchers studying such fields as Tamil, early mission activities in India and South Indian history. The next day, there will be a day-long seminar at the Gurukulam on the Tranquebar Mission's contribution to civil society. Several outstanding scholars are expected to participate in this discussion on the secular contribution by Ziegenbalg and others. On July 5 and 6, the Gurukulam will host a two-day international consultation on the role of Christian missions in the world today. A special jubilee convocation at the Gurukulam on July 7 will be followed by the celebrations moving to Tranquebar where on July 9, 2006, the 300th anniversary of Ziegenbalg's arrival in India, there will be a grand Ecumenical Jubilee Thanksgiving Service with religious leaders of the major Christian denominations participating.
It has been a curious fact that while Pope, Caldwell, Beschi — whose work was printed at Tranquebar in a nice touch of ecumenism — have all been honoured with statues by the Government of Tamil Nadu, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, who first beat the track of Tamil scholarship that was followed by other Christian scholars from abroad, has been forgotten. I hope the tercentenary of his arrival will see him not only honoured but also lead to a greater study of the contributions of the Pietists to India.
S. MUTHIAH
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