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Part 1 of 6
Bibliotheca Malabarica
by Will Sweetman with R. Ilakkuvan
Institut Francais de Pondichery
2012
© Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2012
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
Introduction
1The Bibliotheca Malabarica is an annotated catalogue of Tamil texts collected by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a Protestant missionary in Tranquebar, between July 1706, when he arrived in India, and August 1708, when he sent the catalogue to Europe. The catalogue consists of 165 entries in four sections, covering Protestant, Catholic, “heathen,” and Muslim works respectively. The third section is by far the longest, containing 119 entries for works of Hindu or Jaina provenance. After compiling the catalogue, Ziegenbalg continued to collect and a survey of his other works and letters reveals that he mentions in total no fewer than 170 Hindu and Jaina texts. We can be reasonably confident that Ziegenbalg had access to about 130 of the works he mentions, although it is possible—even probable—that he had other works too. Ziegenbalg’s fame as a pioneering scholar of Tamil Hinduism is based almost entirely on his detailed study of these texts. Although he conversed, and corresponded, with many Hindus, and travelled to a limited extent within the Tamil region, it is above all his study of these “heathen” texts which sets him apart from his contemporaries among European writers on Hinduism.
2It is the third section of Ziegenbalg’s Bibliotheca Malabarica which has also been of most interest to other scholars. Kamil Zvelebil, the great Czech scholar of Tamil literature, describes this section of the work as “a relatively complete account of Tamil literature.”1 By contrast, Hans-Werner Gensichen, a leading historian of mission, characterised it as a jumble of “grammatical and mythological works, songs and stories, philosophy and pornography, astrology and theology.”2 The truth, perhaps, lies somewhere between the two. Ziegenbalg’s collection is not representative; he has few early works and was only minimally aware of the canonical works of the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava tradition, the Tirumuṟai and Nālāyira-Tivyappirapantam. The character of his collection was to some degree determined by happenstance—Ziegenbalg states that he acquired whatever books he could and certainly there were works he acquired without having read, so that he would have had to rely on others’ accounts of their content. Nevertheless the collection is not entirely eclectic either. It was driven both by his own interests, and—as shall be argued here—by the nature of his connections with the Tamils who provided texts for him. If we are to evaluate Ziegenbalg’s understanding of Tamil Hinduism it is crucial to be able to identify and to understand the nature of his sources.
One of the problems, exemplified by the contrasting assessments of Zvelebil and Gensichen, is that scholars of Tamil literature have for the most part been relatively uninterested in Ziegenbalg’s pioneering efforts, and historians of mission have lacked sufficient knowledge of Tamil literature to make an accurate assessment of them. It is our hope that, by collaborating, we have been able to overcome this problem—at least to some extent. We provide here a new translation into English of Ziegenbalg’s account of Tamil literature in the third section of the Bibliotheca Malabarica, which is also the first to include all 119 entries. Following the translation of each entry, we identify the work, comment on Ziegenbalg’s characterisation of it, and provide details of published editions, translations, or manuscript holdings. In the final chapter, we collect also his comments on other texts he mentions in works written after 1708.
3 In this introduction, we discuss Ziegenbalg’s study of Tamil and his acquisition of Tamil texts. We attempt also to determine the character of the library by considering—under the heads of the major genres of Tamil literature—both the works it contained and those which it might have been expected to contain but in fact did not. After considering the fate of Ziegenbalg’s library—and his catalogue of it—after his death, we assess the likely sources of his collection, and conclude by discussing the significance of his library for his account of Hinduism.
Ziegenbalg’s encounter with Tamil
4 Ziegenbalg is renowned as the pioneer of Protestant mission in India. What has been obscured by the host of mostly hagiographical works which recount his life is how little prepared he was for that role. In August 1705 Ziegenbalg was asked whether he would accept a commission from the Danish king, Frederik IV, to go to the West Indies as a missionary. At the time he was acting as a temporary curate in a small town close to Berlin, and intending to return to university to continue the studies that had been interrupted a year earlier by his poor health and the death of his sister. Three weeks later, when in Berlin to attend a wedding, he was surprised to discover that his initial and somewhat equivocal response had been taken as an acceptance.3 In early October, as he set out for Copenhagen—together with his fellow missionary, Heinrich Plütschau—to be ordained, he wrote to August Hermann Francke to say that they were now to be sent to another of the Danish overseas territories in Guinea, West Africa.4 By the time they embarked, on 29 November 1705, the destination had changed again, now finally to the “East Indies.”5 These details are mentioned here in order to demonstrate how little prepared Ziegenbalg was for India and its religions. There is no evidence of his having made any study of what was known of India in Europe prior to his being sent there and during the seven-month voyage the only language Ziegenbalg was able to study was Danish.6 Ziegenbalg mentions only one European work on Indian religion which he had read in 1706, Philippus Baldaeus’s Beschreibung der ost-indischen Küsten Malabar und Coromandel… benebenst der Abgötterey der ost-indischen Heyden (1672).7
5 It is, then, perhaps unsurprising that, on his arrival in India, Ziegenbalg fully expected to find barbarians. While underway to India he wrote that he was being sent to “the barbarous peoples”8 and in 1708 he wrote that when he first came among the Tamils, he shared the opinion of most Europeans that they were a “truly barbaric people” without learning or morals.9 What is striking is how quickly his view changed, within months of his arrival in Tranquebar. Just over two months after his arrival, Ziegenbalg is already describing the Tamils as “a very intelligent and rational people,”10 who lead a “quiet, honorable, and virtuous life,”11 on the basis of their natural powers alone. The initial catalyst for the change in Ziegenbalg’s view of the Tamils seems to have been his conversations with them, carried out in Portuguese.12 [Ziegenbalg’s servant Mutaliyāppaṉ, who knew Portuguese and Tamil and was learning German from Ziegenbalg, translated from Ziegenbalg’s rudimentary Portuguese in these early exchanges (Ziegenbalg, Tranquebar, 16 September 1706, in Lange, Merckwürdige Nachricht, 14). By 12 October 1706, Ziegenbalg and his colleague had the services of a former translator to the Danish East-India Company named Aḻakappaṉ who, in addition to Portuguese and Tamil, knew Danish, German, and Dutch (Kurt Liebau, ed., Die malabarische Korrespondenz: tamilische Briefe an deutsche Missionare; eine Auswahl, Fremde Kulturen in alten Berichten (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998), 20).] While Ziegenbalg reports that many people sought the missionaries out for such discussions, a key figure in shaping his early impressions was an elderly schoolmaster. [Name???] From early September he held his classes in the missionaries’ house, Ziegenbalg and Plütschau sitting with the children and tracing Tamil letters in the sand. While the schoolmaster spoke only Tamil, Ziegenbalg nevertheless reports daily conversations with him from before the time he began learning Tamil.13 The impact was immediate: “I must confess, my seventy-year-old schoolmaster often poses such questions that I can clearly see that not everything in their philosophy can be so irrational as is fondly imagined of the heathen at home.”14 Ziegenbalg emphasizes, however, that it was his reading of Tamil literature which completed the transformation in his view of the Tamils:
Bibliotheca Malabarica
by Will Sweetman with R. Ilakkuvan
Institut Francais de Pondichery
2012
© Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2012
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Ziegenbalg's Evidence
While using all these major authors, La Croze prized the information furnished by Bartholomaus ZIEGENBALG most highly: "He is preferable due to his accuracy and the care he took to report only what he had himself observed and what he read in the books written in a language that had become as natural to him as the one he sucked with his mother's milk" (p. 445). This is exactly the kind of new authority claim that, according to Trautmann, characterized the rise of a "new Orientalism" in the second half of the eighteenth century (1997:32-34). But fifty years before the publication of Holwell's dubious work [1768], La Croze had already corresponded with Ziegenbalg, who recommended the perusal of the manuscript of his Bibliotheca Malabarica (letter of February 1716; Jeyaraj 2003:317). This was an annotated list of 119 Indian texts in the Tamil language collected by Ziegenbalg in the two-year span between his arrival in India (1706) and 1708.2 A modern expert on Tamil literature, Kamil Veith Zvelebil, described this as "a relatively complete account of Tamil literature" (Zvelebil 1973:2), and we can imagine how impressed an early eighteenth-century linguist such as La Croze must have been. While the larger European public got news about the Danish Malabar mission mainly via the Malabar Correspondence and related materials that were first published in German and then partly translated into English (Philipps 1717; Ziegenbalg and Grundler 1719) and French (Niecamp 1745), La Croze enjoyed full access to all the major manuscripts that Ziegenbalg had sent to Europe: his travel account, the Bibliotheca Malabarica, the translations from Tamil morality books, the Malabar Correspondence, the manuscript of the Malabar Heathendom, and of course also the manuscript of the second main work of Ziegenbalg, the Genealogy of Malabar Divinities (Jeyaraj 2003:318).
Ziegenbalg had studied Baldaeus (1672) before arriving in India as a young man of twenty-four years, and in his first letter (September 2, 1706); he described "the content of the four books of law [Vedas] according to his opinion" (Ziegenbalg 1926:14). But he soon realized that Baldaeus "got most [of his information] from the Portuguese fathers who were forced to leave it when they were chased out of Ceylon by the Dutch" and that the rest stemmed "from his dealings with Brahmans who oftentimes know very little of their dogmas" (pp. 14-15). His own work, so the young man decided, would not be such a pastiche (Schmierewerck) cobbled together from other authors but had to be based on reliable sources: "Everything that I have written I have either transcribed word for word from their own books and translated from the Malabar language into German, or I have heard it during frequent discussions from the very mouth of the heathen and had it told to me by people of understanding" (p. 15). That Ziegenbalg knew very little about the Vedas is evident from his manuscript on Malabar heathendom (1711) where he described them as "four small books of law" called "I. Urukkuwedum. 2. Iderwedum. 3. Samawedum. 4. Adirwannawedum" (p. 34).3...
It was thus not in Vedic literature that Ziegenbalg found support for his idea of Indian monotheism but rather in certain Tamil texts (see below) and in assertions of his Indian informants. Via the Malabar Correspondence in the Hallesche Berichte, its translations and summaries, and through passages of Ziegenbalg's works quoted in La Croze, such information from southern India eventually reached the desks of men like Voltaire, Joseph de Guignes, Anquetil-Duperron, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, William Jones, and Constantin-Francois Volney.4
While partly modeling his Genealogy of Malabar Divinities of 1713 on the lists of gods in the "Diwagaram [Tivakaram]" (p. 286), Ziegenbalg omitted the "symbol of Tamil religiosity," Murukan , from his list (p. 299). Instead he began his Genealogy in the manner of a Christian theology book, with a chapter on "Barabarawastu" who in Ziegenbalg's view is "the supreme divine being and origin of all divinities" [das hochste gottliche Wesen und der Ursprung aller Gotter] (p. 37), even though it is not listed in the Tivakaram. As natural monotheists, so Ziegenbalg thought, the Indians must since antiquity have worshiped a supreme divine being who was not just one god among others but rather the very origin of all gods and the world.These heathen know by the light of nature that there is one God. This truth has not only been communicated to them by Christians but is so firmly implanted in their mind [Gem lithe] by the evidence of their conscience that they would regard it as the greatest impiety [Gottlosigkeit] if they would learn that there are people in this world who do not posit a divine being who is the origin of everything, preserves everything, and reigns over everything-the kind of atheism [Atheistrey] that has found entry even among Christians and particularly among learned people here and there. (Ziegenbalg 2003:37).
Ziegenbalg compared such European atheists of the early eighteenth century with "heathen" Indians who are not only naturally monotheist but even profess faith in the very same God that the German pastors evoked in their sermons: "a God who created everything, reigns over everything, punishes evil, rewards good deeds, and who must be feared, loved, worshipped, and prayed to" (p. 37). The faith in this God had not only led the Indians to "establish a law and write many books of religion" but also to "introduce all kinds of sacrifices, build pagodas, and establish everywhere in their lands a formal service that in their opinion serves God" (p. 37). Because they relied exclusively on reason that "since the Fall is entirely misguided and spoiled," they eventually "let themselves be seduced by Satan in various ways." Nevertheless, from time immemorial, they fundamentally accept and worship an invisible divine being and have texts to prove this:Such truth gained from the light of nature is not a recent thing with them but a very ancient one; they have books that are said to be more than 2000 years old. These form the basis of their opinions in these matters, and they hold that their religion is the oldest of all; it may have originated not long after the deluge. They not only believe in one God but have by the light of nature come so far as to accept no more than one single divine being as the origin of all things. Even though they worship many gods, they hold that all such gods have sprung from a single divine being and will return therein; so that in all gods only that single divine being is worshipped. Those among them who are a bit learned will defend this very obstinately even though they cannot deliver any proof of it. (pp. 37-38)
The best among the Indians regard "this Barabarawastu, which means Highest Being [Ens Supremum] or Being of beings [Ens Entium]" as an immaterial being [unmaterialisches Wesen] without any shape. They have hundreds of names for it, for example "Savuvesuren, the Lord over everything; Niddia Anander, the eternally supreme one; or Adinaiagen, the first lord of all who is supreme" (pp. 38-39).5 Asked what this supreme God or Being of all Beings (Wesen aller Wesen] is, an Indian informer wrote in a letter to Ziegenbalg:The supreme God, or the Being of all Beings, has a form yet is without form. He cannot be compared to anything. One cannot describe him nor say that he is this or that. He is neither male nor female, neither heaven nor earth, neither man nor any other creature. This God is not subject to destruction or death. He does not need to rest or sleep. He is omnipotent and omnipresent. He is without beginning and remains unchanged in eternity. His form can neither be seen nor described nor pronounced, etc. (pp. 39-40)
Together with excerpts from Indian scriptures, such letters by Indian "heathen" to Ziegenbalg constituted evidence that deeply impressed European readers including Voltaire. The Malabar Correspondence contained numerous Indian descriptions of God and prayers that for the first time gave voice to the Indians themselves.[???!!!] Bothered by resistance both of Danish administrators in Tranquebar on India's southeastern coast and of Pietist Europeans who questioned the value of the mission, Ziegenbalg and his companion Johann Ernst Grundler had decided to drum up support by having Indians answer written questions and ended up sending translations of no fewer than 104 such letters by Indians to Europe. Ninety-nine of them were published in two installments (1714 and 1717). Some of them appeared also in English and French, and central passages (such as the one just cited) were quoted in Ziegenbalg's manuscripts and in La Croze's book. Given the deist leanings of many European intellectuals, including Voltaire, such documentation of natural monotheism in one of the world's oldest nations did not go unnoticed and substantially contributed to eighteenth-century Europe's gradual shift of interest from China to India....
Ziegenbalg's Founts of Wisdom
Since La Croze's idea of the religion of the Indies was so much based on Ziegenbalg's published and unpublished writings and on letters written by Indians, some basic questions about them need to be posed. Who were these "numerous Indians" who in a short timespan wrote so many letters to Ziegenbalg and insisted so stridently on the monotheism of Indian religion that god-fearing Europeans including Voltaire were astonished? And who were these Gnanigol, the authors of the Indian texts whose translations so much inspired Ziegenbalg, La Croze, and their readers?
When Ziegenbalg arrived in the small Danish colony of Tranquebar on the coast south of Madras (Chennai) in 1706, he first had to learn some Portuguese; but before long he decided that only a thorough knowledge of the local Tamil language would let him communicate freely with the natives. His first teacher of Tamil did not understand Portuguese, and progress was very slow because of the lack of a dictionary and grammar. But he soon met an eminent native who seemed to be the answer to his prayers:We got to know a Malabar who used to be the head [of the Tamil community] here [in Tranquebar] but had been evicted from the town and county [by Danish authorities] because of a certain reason.[!!!] Since he spoke good Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and German, we employed him as translator and managed to get permission for him and his family to return to town. (Letter of Sept. 22, 1707; Jeyaraj 2003:281)
It was this gifted man, Alakappan or Aleppa, who introduced Ziegenbalg to the intricacies of the Tamil language and to the vocabulary needed for his mission. Three months after his arrival Ziegenbalg wrote,My old schoolmaster often discusses with me all day long, and this has already allowed me to become relatively familiar with their forms of religious worship [Gotterdienste]. I intend to make a Christian of him, and he has the hope to eventually turn me into a Malabar. Therefore he seeks to demonstrate everything so distinctly that I could not wish for anything better. (Lehmann 1956:40)...
Aleppa was born around 1660 into a family (probably of higher Tamil Shudra caste) that had long worked for Europeans. Around 1700 he was "Ober-Tolk" (head translator) of the Danish trading company and the top representative of the Tamil inhabitants of the city (Grundler and Ziegenbalg 1998:18). It is not clear for what grave reasons this influential man was banished from Tranquebar; but his value to the mission is reflected both in the decision to let him return to the city and in his extraordinarily high yearly salary of 100 thalers, which surpassed even that of European employees (p. 20). After two years of work with the missionaries, Aleppa was again expelled in 1709. However, the missionaries managed to keep him on their payroll as collaborator from afar. And collaborate he did: in 1710-11 he was even imprisoned by the king of neighboring Tancavur for having "revealed all the secrets of their law and worship [Gesetzes und Gottesdienstes]" to the missionaries (p. 21).
Aleppa clearly played a central role in Ziegenbalg's introduction to the Malabar language and religion, but his influence did not end there. When Ziegenbalg and his associate Grundler needed more European support and were preparing for Ziegenbalg's journey to Germany, Denmark, and England, they paid Aleppa to write letters from exile in answer to the missionaries' questions. These answers were almost immediately translated or edited, annotated, and sent to Europe where they were published; but since Aleppa was in exile and could for various reasons not be named as a source, the missionaries decided to omit all names of correspondents. They tried to create the impression that these letters came from many different informants, and their habit of sometimes splitting a single letter into several pieces (p. 27) that supposedly came from different correspondents enhanced the readers' impression that a substantial number of Indians were involved. The first batch of fifty-five letters was printed in 1714 with a preface emphasizing that "all of these letters without exception are from heathens of the most understanding kind" who write so excellently about God that "one could hardly find better ones with the ancient Greeks and Romans, and many so-called Christians will rightly feel ashamed" (pp. 42-43). Though the Indian heathens had no way of knowing Christ "through the light of nature" and had to be saved "from their misery and blindness," the "Christian readers could not but be pleased, and the atheists ashamed, that even these heathens recognize a single supreme being and are convinced that all men can know with absolute certainty that there is a lord who created this world and everything in it" (p. 44).
Here the letter collection's preface refers to letter number 6, which is "written by someone who read and copied many books of the Christian religion in his language" (p. 115). Though unnamed, this man was, of course, Aleppa; and as in many other letters, he wonders why the missionaries, whom he had orally informed in such detail, wanted him to write about things that they already perfectly knew. The missionaries had obviously asked him to send, against payment of course, a whole series of letters with answers to their questions. The task set for this particular letter was to explain the difference between Christianity and his own religion (p. 116). Aleppa began his explanation as follows:You know me very well and are already well aware of the limits of my knowledge and my utter incapacity of demonstrating such a difference of religion [Gesetz] -- all the more since I was about 15 years old when I entered your [colonial] services and could not yet read nor write well, not to speak of knowing something about the doctrines of our religious texts [Gesetzbucher] .... Since I know many things of your religion [Gesetz] and was educated in my best years not so much according to our but rather according to your ways, it is very difficult and even impossible for me to write about a true difference between these religions [Gesetze] based on your and our religious texts [Gesetzbucher]. But to show you my good will, I will briefly write down my opinion .... All men can know with the utmost certainty that there is a lord who created the world and everything in it. (pp. 116-17)
Time and again, Aleppa wrote to the missionaries that they already knew what they wanted him to explain, and I think that this was not just a polite formula: "You know everything much better than what I can write" (p. 49); "I also know that you already know more about our doctrines [Lehrsatze] than I can write" (p. 89); "You are those who know everything and understand what can be learned by men .... Concerning theology, wisdom, and virtue, I know nothing that you do not already know and understand; you have read and understood much more about this, and I do not presume to instruct people such as you" (p. 114).
Of course, Aleppa was well informed about the missionaries' knowledge; after all, he had been instrumental in teaching them his language and religion, and as their highest-paid, best connected, and most knowledgeable employee, he was also deeply involved in their effort to collect and study the Tamil texts listed in the Bibliotheca Malabarica of 1708. Ignorant about the planned use of his letters for raising mission funds in Europe, he could not figure out why the missionaries wanted letters about things he had so much discussed with them over the years. He expressed his puzzlement once more at the beginning of the twelfth letter:In the year Nandanawaruschum [1712], October 15. I, N., inform the two reverends in Tranquebar that thanks to your prayers I am to date well and without the slightest ill. You desire to know something from me, namely, if we Malabars worship one God or many gods. But can it be that you are in this matter ignorant, you who have for such a long time heard all our doctrines and read in our books and have also preached against [our doctrines] to us? But since you so desire, I will write what I know about it and what everybody knows. (p. 141)
After this interesting introduction, Aleppa repeats what he apparently learned so well since his youth and discussed so many times with the missionaries:The fact that God is a unique God [einiger Gott] is known and professed by all. ... We also say that among all [gods] there is only one who is the highest being, called at times Barabarawastu [Skt. paraparavastu, divine substance] and at times Tschiwen [Shiva], Tschatatschiwum [Skt. sadasiva, eternally graceful one], or Barabiruma [Skt. para-brahma, supreme Brahman]. This God has created all others, given each of them his duties and tasks, and ordered that they must be worshipped and prayed to. All of this is written in our law [Gesetz] and is commanded in old history books. Therefore it is among us everywhere customary to pray to the said persons. At the same time it is written in our books of law that God promised various modes of recompensation to those who worship such persons and accept them in faith and love. (p. 142)
The ordinary people of South India were thus depicted as fundamentally monotheistic, even though they had a tendency to worship the true God under different names and forms. But Aleppa also mentioned radical monotheists:Other than that, there are also people among us who worship God the supreme being alone and always honor only this lord while they renounce everything in the world in order to keep contemplating God in their heart at all times. It is said of these [Gnanigol] that God unites with them and transforms them into himself [in sich verwandele], and also that they become invisible in the world. (p. 142)
The first fifty-five Malabar letters were published in 1714 (reprints in 1718 and 1735) and the remaining forty-four in 1717 (reprints in 1718 and 1735). A number of them soon were excerpted in English translation (Philipps 1717; Ziegenbalg and Grundler 1719), and in 1724, La Croze quoted numerous passages from Ziegenbalg's correspondence and manuscripts.6 Only in 1729, five years after the publication of La Croze's book, did readers of the Halle mission reports first learn that these letters "were mostly written by the translator of the erstwhile missionaries, Arhagappen [Aleppa], who remains a heathen, when he lived nearby and earned his living from this [letter writing] while in exile" (Grundler and Ziegenbalg 1998:17). Though some scholars still believe that many different letter authors were involved, the tone and content of the vast majority of the letters point to a single author who on occasion interviewed knowledgeable persons in his vicinity. The sequence of the first fifty-five letters supports this; the first is from October 2, 1712, and the fifty-fifth from December 10 of the same year. This comes to a bit less than one letter a day, and I may not be too wrong in hypothesizing that Aleppa was contracted to write about one letter per day. In October 1712, twenty-three letters were written, and a letter-free day is often followed by a day with two letters. Though Aleppa certainly integrated information gained from others and sometimes apologizes for drawing only on his own knowledge, these letters for the most part reflect Aleppa's views, which were, of course, developed during his long acquaintance with Europeans, his Western-style education, his years as an official interpreter, and especially his prolonged daily contact with the missionaries in his function as teacher, informant, and translator. He clearly tried to present his own religion in the best light and had adopted the Europeans' fundamental conviction that monotheism was good, while polytheism and idol-worship were evil and the devil's work. In this way European readers, including La Croze, thus read, in a manner of saying, Aleppa's correspondence course on Tamil religion that reflects his earlier lessons to the German missionaries and their discussions. The European readership learned about Indian monotheism from the very man who had introduced Ziegenbalg to Indian religions and had helped him find texts that supported this idea of Indian monotheism.
Ignorance and Wisdom
Ziegenbalg's Tamil treatises are a sort of correspondence course in the opposite direction. To explain how heathendom arose, for example, the missionary informed his Tamil readers that Ananam (Skt. ajnana, ignorance) came into this world through the cunning of Picacu (Skt. pisaca, ghost, goblin) and man's offense. Ziegenbalg pointed out that ajnana (which for him signified idolatrous heathendom) is present when, instead of the true God, only his creatures are worshipped. Only the manusa-avataram (Skt. manusavatara, human manifestation) of Christ could bring true motcam (Skt. moksa, liberation) and conclusively exterminate ajnana (Jieyaraj 2003:311-12).
Aleppa was not the only source of this kind of terminology. Though Ziegenbalg had expected to be sent to Africa and came to India quite unprepared for his task, he was a fast learner-and a lucky one to boot. During a phase of persecution in a neighboring region, a Jesuit missionary's library was stored in Tranquebar, and Ziegenbalg found himself suddenly in possession of much interesting materials that included a Tamil translation of the New Testament. This stroke of luck made him an heir to Jesuit research on terminology that had flourished since the days of Roberto de Nobili. In the Bibliotheca Malabarica of 1708, Ziegenbalg already listed sixteen Roman Catholic works and wrote that he had corrected five of them to such an extent that they could be used by his Protestant flock "without any problem" (p. 291-92).
At this early stage he thus began to employ de Nobili's loaded terminology; for example, he often used the word Caruvecuran (Skt. sarvesvara, lord of all) for God. According to Jeyaraj (2003:292), the twenty-six Tamil sermons of de Nobili contain many words picked up by Ziegenbalg -- for example, the Tamil words for God, angels, devil, world, man, soul, death, salvation, remission, and eternal life. Ziegenbalg's Tamil community was likely to learn, just like de Nobili's flock a century earlier, how important it is for manusan (Skt manusa, man) to avoid pavam (Skt. papa, evil), to embrace punniyam (Skt. punya, virtue), and to worship Caruvecuran (Skt. sarvesvara, lord of all) in the form of Barabarawastu (Skt. paraparavastu, divine substance) because there is no other path to the other shore (karai-erutal) of motcam (Skt. moksa, liberation) (p. 292).
Apart from terms for God such as Caruvecuran and Barabarawastu, the juxtaposition of jnana (knowledge, wisdom) and ajnana (ignorance) was particularly important for Ziegenbalg's view of Indian religions and his mission enterprise. The title of the first pamphlet from the brand-new Tamil mission press in Tranquebar reads: "The Veta-pramanam (Skt. vedapramana, Vedic norm) demonstrating that akkiyanam [ajnana] must be detested and how those in akkiyanam can be saved" (pp. 309-10). In the very first sentence Ziegenbalg comes straight to the point: "We have come to you in order to save you from akkiyanam" (Grafe 2004:83-84). Grafe summarizes the pamphlet's contents as follows:(1) What is a-jnana? -- It is idol worship and moral perversion according to Rom. 1:21-32. (2) How a-jnana spread in this world. -- It did so because of the devil's deceit and men's guilt and not because of God. (3) There is much a-jnana in the whole of Tamilnadu. (4) How detestable a-jnana is. -- Because by a-jnana soul and body will be perverted and punished. (5) How God is helping those in a-jnana to be saved. -- Jesus Christ took upon himself the burden of a-jnana and delivers from ajnana saving soul and body. (6) What the things are which those who wish to be saved from a-jnana have to do .... (7) The trials and tribulations which those who give up a-jnana and enter the Church experience in the world for the sake of righteousness. (8) The benefits promised to those who give up a-jnana, accept true religion and stand in the Christian faith unshaken. (p. 84)
It is clear that Ziegenbalg used the word ajnana (ignorance) for sin, heathendom, and idolatry. On the other hand, jnana (knowledge or wisdom) stood for monotheism and the acceptance of Jesus as savior. For Ziegenbalg, ajnana involves the veneration of false devas and the worship of vikrakams (Skt. vigraha, forms or shapes) made of earth, wood, stone, and metal. By contrast, jnana signifies the exclusive worship of Baribarawastu (Skt. paraparavastu, divine substance). The point Aleppa kept making in his apologetic letters was exactly that his native religion was fundamentally a monotheistic jnana, rather than a heathen ajnana, and it seems that he was highly motivated to help the missionaries find Tamil texts that proved exactly this point. The text that Ziegenbalg most often quotes to illustrate Indian monotheism was already used by de Nobili for the very same purpose: the Civavakkiyam, a fourteenth-century collection of poems by Civavakkiyar who belongs to the Tamil Siddha tradition....
De Nobili's Vedic Restoration Project
Since access to the Vedas was nearly impossible, most of the information about their content was pure fantasy...The Jesuit Roberto DE NOBILI (1577-1656) obtained direct access to some Vedas from his teacher, a Telugu Brahmin called Shivadharma.
He wrote that the four traditional Vedas are "little more than disorderly congeries of various opinions bearing partly on divine, partly on human subjects, a jumble where religious and civil precepts are miscellaneously put together" (Rubies 2000:338). Having been told in 1608 that the fourth Veda was no longer extant, the missionary decided to proclaim himself "teacher of the fourth, lost Veda which deals with the question of salvation" (Zupanov 1999:116). De Nobili apparently believed, like his contemporary Matteo Ricci in China, that though original pure monotheism had degenerated into idolatry, vestiges of the original religion survived and could serve to regenerate the ancient creed under the sign of the Cross. After his failed experiment with Buddhist robes (see Chapter I), Ricci adopted the dress of a Confucian scholar, asserted that the Chinese had anciently been pure monotheists, and proclaimed Christianity to be the fulfillment of the doctrines found in ancient Chinese texts. A few years later, Ricci's compatriot de Nobili presented himself in India as an ascetic "sannayasi from the North" and "restorer of 'a lost spiritual Veda'" (Rubies 2000:339) who hailed from faraway Rome where the Ur-tradition had been best preserved. In his Relafao annual for the year 1608, Fernao Guerreiro wrote on a similar line that he was studying Brahmin letters to present his Christian message as a restoration of the spiritual Veda, the true original religion of all countries, including India whose adulterated vestiges were the religions of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva (p. 344).
For de Nobili, the word "Veda" signified the spiritual law revealed by God. He called himself a teacher of Satyavedam, that is, the true revealed law, who had studied philosophy and this very law in Rome. He maintained that his was exactly the same law that "by God's order had been taught in earlier times by Sannyasins" in India (Bachmann 1972:154). De Nobili thus had come to India to restore satyavedam and to bring back, as the title of his didactic Sanskrit poem says, "The Essence of True Revelation [satyavedam]" (Castets 1935:40). De Nobili's description of the traditional Indian Vedas clearly shows that he did not regard them as "genuine Vedas" or genuine divine revelations. That de Nobili was for a long time suspected of being the author of the Ezour-vedam is understandable because in that text Chumontou has fundamentally the same role as de Nobili: he exposes the degenerate accretions of the reigning clergy's "Veda," represented by the traditional Veda compiler Biache (Vyasa), in order to teach them about satyavedam, the divine Ur-revelation whose correct transmission he represents against the degenerate transmission in the Vedas of the Brahmins. This "genuine Veda" had once upon a time been brought to India, but subsequently the Indians had forgotten it and instituted the false Veda that is now religiously followed. The common aim of de Nobili and of Chumontou was the restoration of the true, most ancient divine revelation (Veda) and the denunciation of the false, degenerated Veda that the Brahmins now call their own.
In the wake of Ricci in China and de Nobili in India, the desire to find and study ancient texts and to acquire the necessary linguistic skills to handle them was increasing both among China and India missionaries, and this desire was clearly linked to the idea of a common Ur-tradition and its local vestiges that could be put to use for "accommodation" or, as I prefer to call it, "friendly takeover." What we have observed in other chapters, namely, that religion is deeply linked to the beginnings of the systematic study of oriental languages and literatures, clearly also applies to India; and if such study produced wondrous Egyptian (Kircher) and Chinese figurist flowers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the heyday of India in this respect was yet to come....
After Abbe Jean-Paul Bignon had been nominated to the post of director of the Royal Library in 1719 and of the special library at the Louvre in 1720 (Leung 2002:130), he gave orders to acquire the Vedas. But this was easier said than done. In 1730 a young and linguistically gifted Jesuit by the name of Jean CALMETTE (1693-1740), who had joined the Jesuit India mission in 1726, wrote about the difficulties:Those who for thirty years have written that the Vedam cannot be found were not completely wrong: there was not enough money to find them. Many people, missionaries, and laymen, have spent money for nothing and were left empty-handed when they thought they would get everything. Less than six years ago [in 1726] two missionaries, one in Bengal and the other one here [in Carnate], were duped. Mr. Didier, the royal engineer, gave sixty rupees for a book that was supposed to be the Vedam on the order of Father Pons, the superior of [the Jesuit mission of] Bengal. (Bach 1847:441)
But in the same letter Calmette announced that he was certain of having found the genuine Vedas:The Vedams found here have clarified issues regarding other books. They had been considered so impossible to find that in Pondicherry many people could not believe that it was the genuine Vedam, and I was asked if I had thoroughly examined it. But the investigations I have made leave no doubt whatsoever; and I continue to examine them every day when scholars or young brahmins who learn the Vedam in the schools of the land come to see me and I make them recite it. I even recite together with them what I have learned from some text's beginning or from other places. It is the Vedam; there is no more doubt about this. (p. 441)
Calmette achieved this success thanks to a Brahmin who was a secret Christian, and in 1731 he reported having acquired all four Vedas, including the fourth that de Nobili had thought lost (p. 442). In 1732, Father le Gac mailed to Paris two Vedas written in Telugu letters on palm leaves, and the copying of the remaining two was ongoing (p. 442)....
From the early 1730s Calmette thus collected -- probably with the help of knowledgeable Indians and later of Pons -- examples of "fundamental truths" as well as "details of all errors" from the Vedas. This was the first systematic effort by Europeans to study such a mass of ancient Indian texts; and it was not an easy task because the language of these texts proved to be so difficult that even most Indians were at a loss:What is surprising is that the majority of those who are its depositaries do not understand its meaning because it is written in a very ancient language, and the Samouscroutam [Sanskrit], which is as familiar to the scholars as Latin is among us, is not yet sufficient [for understanding] unless aided by a commentary both for the thought and for the words. It is called the Maha Bachiam, the great commentary.9 Those who make that kind of book their study are first-rate scholars among them. (p. 395)
At the time there were only six active Jesuit missionaries in the whole Carnate region around Pondicherry (p. 391), but they were assisted by many more Indian catechists who were essential for the mission. The missionaries could not personally go to some regions because of Brahmin opposition and other reasons, and to preach there was a main task of these catechists. Calmette's objective in studying the Vedas was not a translation of any part of them. That would definitely have been impossible after just a few years of study, even with the help of Pons. The language of these texts, particularly that of earlier Vedas, was a tough nut to crack even for learned Indians....
But Calmette tried his hand at composing some verses in Sanskrit and wrote on December 20, 1737, after a bout of fever that had hindered his study of Sanskrit: "I could not help composing a few verses in this language, in the style of controversy, to oppose them to those poured forth by the Indians" (Castets 1935:40). Calmette was inspired by de Nobili's writings that were stored at the Pondicherry mission and seems to have partly copied and rearranged de Nobili's Sattia Veda Sanghiragham (Essence of genuine revelation) (p. 40), whose title expresses exactly the idea that seems to have influenced Calmette so profoundly: the notion of a true Veda (satya veda)....
In 1816, Francis Ellis found in Pondicherry a total of eight manuscripts (including the Ezour-vedam) among the remains of the old Jesuit library. His description of these texts, published in 1822, was fortunately rather detailed and must be used here because the texts from the old Jesuit library that Ellis saw have all vanished.[???!!!] The last person to hold the Pondicherry texts in his hands appears to be the Jesuit Castets [1858-1936] who examined them some time before 1935 (Rocher 1984:75). All we thus have at our disposal today are the Ezour-vedam manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and a number of descriptions of other "Pondicherry Veda" texts (see below) by Ellis and others.13
These texts all employ the same basic scheme popular in mission literature: a conversation between a teacher and a pupil (Ellis 1822:43). As in the Ezour-vedam, the teacher figure represents the "cult of the genuine God" and the pupil the degenerate cult (p. 14). The teachers criticize the pupil's degenerate religion and urge a return to the faith of even earlier times. Both the style and content of these texts seem designed for easy memorization by catechists and maximum impact in debates and recitation before a public that needed to be convinced and prepared for the real Good News. The role of the Pondicherry Vedas was to prepare the ground by denouncing the reigning religion and undermining its claim to genuine transmission of divinely revealed teachings. This implied of course a frontal attack on the Vedas and its traditional guardians.
Tharangambadi, formerly Tranquebar Coordinates: 11°1′45″N 79°50′58″E / Pondicherry Coordinates: 11°55′N 79°49′EDuring a phase of persecution in a neighboring region, a Jesuit missionary's library was stored in Tranquebar, and Ziegenbalg found himself suddenly in possession of much interesting materials that included a Tamil translation of the New Testament. This stroke of luck made him an heir to Jesuit research on terminology that had flourished since the days of Roberto de Nobili. In the Bibliotheca Malabarica of 1708, Ziegenbalg already listed sixteen Roman Catholic works and wrote that he had corrected five of them to such an extent that they could be used by his Protestant flock "without any problem" (p. 291-92).
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
Introduction
1The Bibliotheca Malabarica is an annotated catalogue of Tamil texts collected by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a Protestant missionary in Tranquebar, between July 1706, when he arrived in India, and August 1708, when he sent the catalogue to Europe. The catalogue consists of 165 entries in four sections, covering Protestant, Catholic, “heathen,” and Muslim works respectively. The third section is by far the longest, containing 119 entries for works of Hindu or Jaina provenance. After compiling the catalogue, Ziegenbalg continued to collect and a survey of his other works and letters reveals that he mentions in total no fewer than 170 Hindu and Jaina texts. We can be reasonably confident that Ziegenbalg had access to about 130 of the works he mentions, although it is possible—even probable—that he had other works too. Ziegenbalg’s fame as a pioneering scholar of Tamil Hinduism is based almost entirely on his detailed study of these texts. Although he conversed, and corresponded, with many Hindus, and travelled to a limited extent within the Tamil region, it is above all his study of these “heathen” texts which sets him apart from his contemporaries among European writers on Hinduism.
2It is the third section of Ziegenbalg’s Bibliotheca Malabarica which has also been of most interest to other scholars. Kamil Zvelebil, the great Czech scholar of Tamil literature, describes this section of the work as “a relatively complete account of Tamil literature.”1 By contrast, Hans-Werner Gensichen, a leading historian of mission, characterised it as a jumble of “grammatical and mythological works, songs and stories, philosophy and pornography, astrology and theology.”2 The truth, perhaps, lies somewhere between the two. Ziegenbalg’s collection is not representative; he has few early works and was only minimally aware of the canonical works of the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava tradition, the Tirumuṟai and Nālāyira-Tivyappirapantam. The character of his collection was to some degree determined by happenstance—Ziegenbalg states that he acquired whatever books he could and certainly there were works he acquired without having read, so that he would have had to rely on others’ accounts of their content. Nevertheless the collection is not entirely eclectic either. It was driven both by his own interests, and—as shall be argued here—by the nature of his connections with the Tamils who provided texts for him. If we are to evaluate Ziegenbalg’s understanding of Tamil Hinduism it is crucial to be able to identify and to understand the nature of his sources.
Ziegenbalg... soon met an eminent native who seemed to be the answer to his prayers:We got to know a Malabar who used to be the head [of the Tamil community] here [in Tranquebar] but had been evicted from the town and county [by Danish authorities] because of a certain reason.[!!!] Since he spoke good Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, and German, we employed him as translator and managed to get permission for him and his family to return to town. (Letter of Sept. 22, 1707; Jeyaraj 2003:281)
It was this gifted man, Alakappan or Aleppa, who introduced Ziegenbalg to the intricacies of the Tamil language and to the vocabulary needed for his mission. Three months after his arrival Ziegenbalg wrote,My old schoolmaster often discusses with me all day long, and this has already allowed me to become relatively familiar with their forms of religious worship [Gotterdienste]. I intend to make a Christian of him, and he has the hope to eventually turn me into a Malabar. Therefore he seeks to demonstrate everything so distinctly that I could not wish for anything better. (Lehmann 1956:40)...
Aleppa was born around 1660 into a family (probably of higher Tamil Shudra caste) that had long worked for Europeans. Around 1700 he was "Ober-Tolk" (head translator) of the Danish trading company and the top representative of the Tamil inhabitants of the city (Grundler and Ziegenbalg 1998:18). It is not clear for what grave reasons this influential man was banished from Tranquebar; but his value to the mission is reflected both in the decision to let him return to the city and in his extraordinarily high yearly salary of 100 thalers, which surpassed even that of European employees (p. 20). After two years of work with the missionaries, Aleppa was again expelled in 1709. However, the missionaries managed to keep him on their payroll as collaborator from afar. And collaborate he did: in 1710-11 he was even imprisoned by the king of neighboring Tancavur for having "revealed all the secrets of their law and worship [Gesetzes und Gottesdienstes]" to the missionaries (p. 21).
Aleppa clearly played a central role in Ziegenbalg's introduction to the Malabar language and religion, but his influence did not end there. When Ziegenbalg and his associate Grundler needed more European support and were preparing for Ziegenbalg's journey to Germany, Denmark, and England, they paid Aleppa to write letters from exile in answer to the missionaries' questions. These answers were almost immediately translated or edited, annotated, and sent to Europe where they were published; but since Aleppa was in exile and could for various reasons not be named as a source, the missionaries decided to omit all names of correspondents. They tried to create the impression that these letters came from many different informants, and their habit of sometimes splitting a single letter into several pieces (p. 27) that supposedly came from different correspondents enhanced the readers' impression that a substantial number of Indians were involved. The first batch of fifty-five letters was printed in 1714 with a preface emphasizing that "all of these letters without exception are from heathens of the most understanding kind" who write so excellently about God that "one could hardly find better ones with the ancient Greeks and Romans, and many so-called Christians will rightly feel ashamed" (pp. 42-43)....
Aleppa was not the only source of this kind of terminology... During a phase of persecution in a neighboring region, a Jesuit missionary's library was stored in Tranquebar, and Ziegenbalg found himself suddenly in possession of much interesting materials that included a Tamil translation of the New Testament. This stroke of luck made him an heir to Jesuit research on terminology that had flourished since the days of Roberto de Nobili. In the Bibliotheca Malabarica of 1708, Ziegenbalg already listed sixteen Roman Catholic works and wrote that he had corrected five of them to such an extent that they could be used by his Protestant flock "without any problem" (p. 291-92).
At this early stage he thus began to employ de Nobili's loaded terminology; for example, he often used the word Caruvecuran (Skt. sarvesvara, lord of all) for God. According to Jeyaraj (2003:292), the twenty-six Tamil sermons of de Nobili contain many words picked up by Ziegenbalg -- for example, the Tamil words for God, angels, devil, world, man, soul, death, salvation, remission, and eternal life. Ziegenbalg's Tamil community was likely to learn, just like de Nobili's flock a century earlier, how important it is for manusan (Skt manusa, man) to avoid pavam (Skt. papa, evil), to embrace punniyam (Skt. punya, virtue), and to worship Caruvecuran (Skt. sarvesvara, lord of all) in the form of Barabarawastu (Skt. paraparavastu, divine substance) because there is no other path to the other shore (karai-erutal) of motcam (Skt. moksa, liberation) (p. 292).
Apart from terms for God such as Caruvecuran and Barabarawastu, the juxtaposition of jnana (knowledge, wisdom) and ajnana (ignorance) was particularly important for Ziegenbalg's view of Indian religions and his mission enterprise....
The point Aleppa kept making in his apologetic letters was exactly that his native religion was fundamentally a monotheistic jnana, rather than a heathen ajnana, and it seems that he was highly motivated to help the missionaries find Tamil texts that proved exactly this point. The text that Ziegenbalg most often quotes to illustrate Indian monotheism was already used by de Nobili for the very same purpose: the Civavakkiyam, a fourteenth-century collection of poems by Civavakkiyar who belongs to the Tamil Siddha tradition.
-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App
One of the problems, exemplified by the contrasting assessments of Zvelebil and Gensichen, is that scholars of Tamil literature have for the most part been relatively uninterested in Ziegenbalg’s pioneering efforts, and historians of mission have lacked sufficient knowledge of Tamil literature to make an accurate assessment of them. It is our hope that, by collaborating, we have been able to overcome this problem—at least to some extent. We provide here a new translation into English of Ziegenbalg’s account of Tamil literature in the third section of the Bibliotheca Malabarica, which is also the first to include all 119 entries. Following the translation of each entry, we identify the work, comment on Ziegenbalg’s characterisation of it, and provide details of published editions, translations, or manuscript holdings. In the final chapter, we collect also his comments on other texts he mentions in works written after 1708.
3 In this introduction, we discuss Ziegenbalg’s study of Tamil and his acquisition of Tamil texts. We attempt also to determine the character of the library by considering—under the heads of the major genres of Tamil literature—both the works it contained and those which it might have been expected to contain but in fact did not. After considering the fate of Ziegenbalg’s library—and his catalogue of it—after his death, we assess the likely sources of his collection, and conclude by discussing the significance of his library for his account of Hinduism.
Ziegenbalg’s encounter with Tamil
4 Ziegenbalg is renowned as the pioneer of Protestant mission in India. What has been obscured by the host of mostly hagiographical works which recount his life is how little prepared he was for that role. In August 1705 Ziegenbalg was asked whether he would accept a commission from the Danish king, Frederik IV, to go to the West Indies as a missionary. At the time he was acting as a temporary curate in a small town close to Berlin, and intending to return to university to continue the studies that had been interrupted a year earlier by his poor health and the death of his sister. Three weeks later, when in Berlin to attend a wedding, he was surprised to discover that his initial and somewhat equivocal response had been taken as an acceptance.3 In early October, as he set out for Copenhagen—together with his fellow missionary, Heinrich Plütschau—to be ordained, he wrote to August Hermann Francke to say that they were now to be sent to another of the Danish overseas territories in Guinea, West Africa.4 By the time they embarked, on 29 November 1705, the destination had changed again, now finally to the “East Indies.”5 These details are mentioned here in order to demonstrate how little prepared Ziegenbalg was for India and its religions. There is no evidence of his having made any study of what was known of India in Europe prior to his being sent there and during the seven-month voyage the only language Ziegenbalg was able to study was Danish.6 Ziegenbalg mentions only one European work on Indian religion which he had read in 1706, Philippus Baldaeus’s Beschreibung der ost-indischen Küsten Malabar und Coromandel… benebenst der Abgötterey der ost-indischen Heyden (1672).7
5 It is, then, perhaps unsurprising that, on his arrival in India, Ziegenbalg fully expected to find barbarians. While underway to India he wrote that he was being sent to “the barbarous peoples”8 and in 1708 he wrote that when he first came among the Tamils, he shared the opinion of most Europeans that they were a “truly barbaric people” without learning or morals.9 What is striking is how quickly his view changed, within months of his arrival in Tranquebar. Just over two months after his arrival, Ziegenbalg is already describing the Tamils as “a very intelligent and rational people,”10 who lead a “quiet, honorable, and virtuous life,”11 on the basis of their natural powers alone. The initial catalyst for the change in Ziegenbalg’s view of the Tamils seems to have been his conversations with them, carried out in Portuguese.12 [Ziegenbalg’s servant Mutaliyāppaṉ, who knew Portuguese and Tamil and was learning German from Ziegenbalg, translated from Ziegenbalg’s rudimentary Portuguese in these early exchanges (Ziegenbalg, Tranquebar, 16 September 1706, in Lange, Merckwürdige Nachricht, 14). By 12 October 1706, Ziegenbalg and his colleague had the services of a former translator to the Danish East-India Company named Aḻakappaṉ who, in addition to Portuguese and Tamil, knew Danish, German, and Dutch (Kurt Liebau, ed., Die malabarische Korrespondenz: tamilische Briefe an deutsche Missionare; eine Auswahl, Fremde Kulturen in alten Berichten (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998), 20).] While Ziegenbalg reports that many people sought the missionaries out for such discussions, a key figure in shaping his early impressions was an elderly schoolmaster. [Name???] From early September he held his classes in the missionaries’ house, Ziegenbalg and Plütschau sitting with the children and tracing Tamil letters in the sand. While the schoolmaster spoke only Tamil, Ziegenbalg nevertheless reports daily conversations with him from before the time he began learning Tamil.13 The impact was immediate: “I must confess, my seventy-year-old schoolmaster often poses such questions that I can clearly see that not everything in their philosophy can be so irrational as is fondly imagined of the heathen at home.”14 Ziegenbalg emphasizes, however, that it was his reading of Tamil literature which completed the transformation in his view of the Tamils:
When at last I was entirely able to read their own books, and became aware that the very same philosophical disciplines as are discussed by scholars in Europe are quite methodically taught among them, and also that they have a proper written law from which all theological matters must be derived and demonstrated [???]; all this astonished me greatly, and I developed a very strong desire to be thoroughly instructed in their heathenism from their own writings. I therefore obtained for myself ever more books, one after the other, and spared neither effort nor expense until I have now—through diligent reading of their books and through constant debating with their Bramans or priests—reached the point where I have a sure knowledge of them, and am able to give an account.15