[2] His father was the secretary of the Bible Society and started a missionary magazine in 1823, which gave the young Gundert his first experiences in printing and publishing.

While travelling on the ship he concentrated on learning Bengali, Hindustani and Telugu and taught these languages to his fellow passengers.

In Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) Hermann Gundert had an audience with His Highness Sree Swathi Thirunal Maharaja, the ruler of Travancore.

He learned the language from well-established local teachers Uracheri Gurukkanmar from Chokli, a village near Thalassery and consulted them in his works.

At his numerous visits to the villages around Tellicherry, Gundert got in close contact with the people, collected as many words, phrases and proverbs as possible and spread the Gospel.

Many of the material – old Malayalam documents and scriptures from Tellicherry and other places in Malabar – which Gundert had collected he later gave to the University of Tübingen.

In the beginning of 1857, the government appointed Gundert as the first Inspector of Schools in Malabar and Canara – from Calicut (Kozhikode) in the South till Hubli in the North.

He appointed teachers, wrote textbooks for schools, colleges and the newly established Madras University and also compiled examination papers.

In Kerala, Gundert is venerated for his deep interest in the local culture as well as the development of the Malayalam language, for compiling grammatical books for school starters as well as for the University level.

Apart from the early inscriptions found on copper and stone, Gundert traced Malayalam to the Rāma Charitam, a poem predating the Sanskrit alphabet.

[7] Gundert is highly regarded among linguistic experts and his dictionary has been described as "monumental" in a review of the work on Dravidian languages.