Printing in Tamil language
Once the immigrants realized the importance of the local language, they began to disseminate their religious teachings through that medium, in effect ushering in the vernacular print culture in India.
[1] The appearance of Tamil in print, both in Roman transliteration and in its native script was the result of the convergence between colonial expansion and local politics, coupled with the beginnings of the Jesuit 'Madurai Mission' led, among others, by a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Henrique Henriques who arrived on the Fishery Coast (Tuticorin) in 1547.
During his stay Henriques produced five different books in the Tamil script and language, printed at various Jesuit settlements on the west coast.
In 1577 the first of the Henriques’ five books, Doctrina Christam en Lingua Malauar Tamul (Thambiran Vanakkam) was printed in Goa.
Unlike Henriques, Roberto de Nobili did not translate a Portuguese text into Tamil, instead he wrote his own manual, so that he might emphasize the hidden truths of the new faith.
With the objective of facilitating a wider and faster dissemination of Christian literature, Ziegenbalg in his letter of August 22, 1708, put forth a demand for a “Malabarick and Portuguese printing press”.
[2] In the meantime, Ziegenbalg devoted considerable attention to collecting manuscripts of Indian literature, as this would help him to understand the old beliefs of the Hindus which he proposed to refute.
In a letter written in 1708, Ziegenbalg speaks of 26 sermons delivered by him at the church of Tranquebar and two vocabularies of Malabar language prepared by him.
In 1711 the society sent the mission some copies of the Bible in Portuguese as well as a printing press with pica types and other accessories along with a printer to operate it.
The difference in the Christian beliefs of the respective cults gave rise to rigorous disputes and theological debates, which on many occasions even led to violent conflicts resulting in injuries and death.
Although printing in Tamil was introduced by the Jesuits, by the eighteenth century the scenario had changed and the domain of the press came to be majority controlled and cultivated by the Protestants.
Beschi's efforts in a place populated with thousands of Lutheran converts (mainly Tanjore and Travancore), grew to become an "alarming", "arrogant" and "formidable" rival to the already sprawling missionary activities of the Protestant fathers.
In the books of Muttusami Pillai (Beschi's Tamil biographer), he is frequently portrayed as a traditional Eastern or Oriental king, adorned with ornate jewellery and chandan on his forehead.
[4] Beschi was reportedly favoured by the local rulers, especially Chanda Sahib whom he had served diwan to, thereby making it easier for him to master the language.
Contrary to this image, Beschi has also been examined as a magical Indian "poet-saint" with extraordinary literary skills and persuasion prowess.
According to sources, Beschi wrote more than twenty books :– dictionaries, epic poetry, prose collections, grammar, folklore.
He composed various interlingual dictionaries: Tamil-Latin, Latin-Tamil-Portuguese, and Tamil-French and most importantly the four-way lexicon Tamil-Tamil Catur-Agarati which comprised meanings, synonyms, rhymes, etc.
Although it cannot be assumed that his works were well accepted and appreciated by the Protestants, as Blackburn comments, the rival camp unbiasedly “admired Beschi’s literary skills - they printed one of his grammars and another of his books (Vetiyar Olukkam, A Manual for Catechists) became standard reading for them by the nineteenth century…”.
Although Beschi claimed that the sole purpose of the book was to disseminate amusement and humour among both locals and missionaries, Blackburn mentions that the author was most probably yearning for something more than that – “this was a plea for a Jesuit patron, somewhere outside India, to underwrite the publication of his dictionary and folktale”,[7] as print was a more reliable medium to “demonstrate correct spelling” than local scribes and copyists.
In the history of print in early nineteenth-century India there were an enormous number of books of oral literature, especially folktales published.
Pundits who were educated at the College Fort of St George and some who were not, used the text-making skills they learned from the Europeans in setting up of their own presses at Madras.
[9] These presses quickly became associated with movements in deflecting the missionaries as they started voicing the sentiments of certain sections of the Hindu community.
Among his editions the most important are Mantalapurutar's lexicon cutamani nikantu with commentary (first printed in 1849), the standard medieval grammar Nannūl with a commentary (1851), the early devotional poem Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, Manikkavacakar’s great devotional poems Tiruvacakam and tirukkovaiyar, the text of Tirukkuṛaḷ with Parimelazhagar’s detailed gloss in 1861.
Earlier in 1712, a printing press enabled with Tamil and Telugu typefaces was provided by the SPCK for publishing activities at Tranquebar, on repeated appeals by Ziegenbalg.
When the English army under Sir Eyre Coote attacked the French colony of Pondicherry in 1761 they seized the printing press from the governor's house along with its typefaces (which were a “prize catch” for them [13]) and the printer, Delon and transferred it to Madras.
Nonetheless Johann Phillip Fabricius, a well-known Tamil scholar convinced Coote to hand over the press, only on agreement that the printing demands of Fort St. George would be given maximum importance.
