The Tranquebar Mission

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau were Germans and Lutherans, educated at Berlin and then at the university of Halle, as the English editor of their letters records (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, preliminary discourse, sections 42–43). They went to India under King Frederick IV of Denmark; a Danish account printed with their letters dates the king’s care for the mission from 1705 (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part III, p. 134). On 9 July 1706 their ship reached Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast, and three days later Ziegenbalg wrote home that the place was inhabited by “Malabarian Heathens” and would give them work enough without going further inland (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, pp. 17–18).

Their first care, he says, was language. Having learned Portuguese, they took a Tamil schoolmaster into their house and then hired a translator who had served the East India Company, and within eight months Ziegenbalg could read, write and speak “Malabarick”, as he calls Tamil. The two agreed that he would catechize in Tamil and Plütschau in Portuguese. From December 1706 they preached in the Danish church of the settlement (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, letter 9, pp. 66–69). The first baptism, of five converts who had given an account of the articles of the faith, was held there. They also built a stone church of their own outside the town, among the Tamil houses, consecrated it on 14 August and named it Jerusalem. By the time of the letter the congregation numbered sixty-three (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, letter 9, pp. 69–72).

Ziegenbalg writes that converts were cast off by their own people and needed support, and that the missionaries had opened a charity school (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, letter 8, pp. 60–61). In October 1707 he sent to Europe the four Gospels translated into Tamil (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, letter 10, pp. 75–78). A letter from Madras in January 1710 counts about one hundred and sixty baptized persons and catechumens and is headed as reporting that a translation of the New Testament was being attempted (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part II, letter 7, pp. 44–50). In December 1713 the missionaries wrote that their Tamil press and type foundry were well advanced (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part III, letter of 11 December 1713, pp. 76–78), and in September 1714 that the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were printed, the rest waiting for paper (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part III, letter 15, pp. 116–120).

The English chaplain at Madras, George Lewis, wrote of the mission in 1712: “It is the first Attempt the Protestants ever have made in that Kind” (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part III, letter 4, pp. 41–42). The letters were printed in German and English to raise support, and gifts for Tranquebar were sent through August Hermann Francke at Halle (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, preliminary discourse, sections 42–43) (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, preliminary discourse, sections 47–48, pp. xxxv–xxxvi). See Spener’s Pia Desideria and the Rise of Pietism.