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The German connection
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A recent conference threw light on the ties between India and Germany over the last 300 years
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PHOTO: D. GOPALAKRISHNAN
STRENGTHENING BONDS Dr. Gabriele Landwehr and Gita Dharmapal-Frick at the conference
"Their tongue ...(now) is as easy to me as my mother tongue, and in the last two years I have been enabled to write several books in Tamil..." This is what Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg wrote in 1709.
Three hundred years on, the significant contributions made by the German Pietist missionary from the Danish Halle Mission are as relevant as ever, as was evident at "Cultural Encounters in South India," a just concluded conference. It was put together by the Goethe Institut-Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai, in association with Madras Musings, German Returnees Association, Chennai, and the South Asia Institute-Reprecht-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg, to celebrate the 300th jubilee of Ziegenbalg arrival on Indian soil in July 1706.
As Gabriele Landwehr, director, Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai, put it, "This was not only the commemoration of Ziegenbalg's arrival in India but also the 500-year-old trade relations between the two nations. What really impressed me was the way the two cultures came together, the way in which the missionaries, who came here primarily to spread the Gospel, took interest in the local culture and documented it in the native tongue."
Historically, Ziegenbalg came to Tranquebar with fellow Pietists with the sole purpose of doing missionary work. Realising that the best way to communicate with the locals was in their own language, he learnt Tamil. And within a span of eight or nine months, he had become a scholar. Zeigenbalg's greatest contribution to India was recording the Tamil way of life and sending it back to Halle where it was documented and preserved. He set up a printing press in Tranquebar (from where the first Tamil book was printed) and the first paper mill in Kaduthasipattarai, and translated the Old Testament and the New Testament into Tamil. This marked the beginnings of printing in Tamil.
Not just that, the priest took back a slice of India to Europe, when he wrote about Hinduism, the science of Ayurveda and yoga. His works Malabarisches Heidenthum, Genealogy of the Malabarian Gods and Grammatica Damulica, a treatise on Tamil grammar, provided a different perspective of the thoughts and practices of the Tamils of that time.
Said Dr. Landwehr, who dedicated the meeting to the memory of Gerhard Fischer, who passed away some time ago, "It's interesting to note the deep interest that visiting Europeans now evince in the bonds that South India shared with Europe. Especially in the spiritual field. And I think these missionaries laid the foundation for that."
She continued, "I think the single biggest contribution the mission made to Tamil society was printing. If they had not been able to print the texts and the other literature, less would have been known in Germany about the culture here and vice versa. There was a lot of spiritual and cultural exchange thanks to them. As for the present, the bond between the two nations is one of friendship."
The conference saw several speakers throw light on the Zeigenbalg connection with India.
Gita Dharmapal-Frick of the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg, threw light on the proto-ethnographic treatises of Zeigenbalg, "which despite their inevitable missionary bias, represent an early example of `oral history'."
Prof. Anand Amaldass, director, Satya Nilayam, spoke about the `Indianisation of Christianity.' He said, "The missionaries championed the cause of the depressed. They began by educating the locals and even set up a Tamil school in 1707. I think they helped in rediscovering the Tamil cultural identity."
New-Zealand based Zimbabwean Will Sweetman spoke of how the missionaries of this period recognised the importance of Hinduism, as opposed to the later priests who, in fact, downplayed it. Zeigenbalg and others felt it was important to "live like the locals and imbibe their culture instead of change the way they ate, spoke and clothed themselves." Dr. Sweetman said, "That a German missionary had over 300 books (palm leaf manuscripts) in Tamil lining his library shelves tells a lot about the kind of man Zeigenbalg was."
The relevance of the city of Halle in Indo-German relations of the time was the topic that Matthias Frenz from Bonn chose to speak on. "The last known mission from Halle to India was in 1837. After that, the ties were revived off and on. But the last known visit to Halle was from a Madras delegation in 1971. However, the work of the mission has been completely ignored," said Dr. Frenz.
Different aspects of Indo-German ties in the fields of art, music, theatre and linguistics were discussed during the three-day conference.
SAVITHA GAUTAM
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