rotestant missionaries also contributed to education in India.  King Frederick IV’s chaplain insisted there should be a Lutheran presence in the Danish settlements.  As a compromise, King Frederick invited the Pietists from Halle in eastern Germany to send out priests to Tranquebar now in Tamilnadu, near Chidambaram. The 23-year-old Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and the rather older Heinrich Plutschau answered the call.  When they arrived in India on July 9th, 1706 they founded the first formal Protestant

mission in Asia.  Ziegenbalg realized that if he was to interact with the local population he would have to learn not only the Lingua Franca of the coast, Portuguese, but also the local tongue, Tamil, that the Portuguese called “Malabar”.  He must have been a born linguist, for within a couple of months he learnt sufficient Portuguese to be able to use it to learn Tamil with the help of an untrained tutor, Ellappar, who taught him in the traditional way by tracing the letters of the Tamil alphabet on a bed of sand. Within three months, Ziegenbalg was writing in Tamil. Ziegenbalg converted only a few Malabarians and spent far more time studying Tamil.  He set up the first printing press in India after the Portugueses’ effort ground to a halt. He established a publishing programme.

As early as 1709 Ziegenbalg requested a printing press from Denmark. The Danes forwarded the appeal to London to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.  The SPCK, not allowed a foothold in India by John company’s merchants, was only too eager to help and in 1712 shipped out to the Tranquebar mission a printing press with type, paper, ink and a printer.  When the SPCK consignment arrived in Madras, the printer was missing.  Fortunately, a German soldier in the Danish Company’s service knew something about printing and was recruited.

Johann Heinrich Schloricke, was 30 years old at the time, printed in Portuguese the Tranquebar mission press’s first publications in 1712/13.  With this, printing in India got its second wind and the foundations for today’s thriving Indian Printing Industry were laid.

Ziegenbalg, however, was convinced that the Mission’s work could prove successful only if the press produced books and other literature in Tamil.  He therefore sent back drawings of the Tamil alphabet to Halle with the request to create Tamil typefaces there.  The Tamil type arrived in Madras on June 29, 1713, together with three Germans who were to galvanize the press and printing when they got to Tranquebar by the end of August and started work.  Initially it was purely Christian propaganda material that rolled out of here in Tamil.  Slowly some educational material came out. Ziegenbalg was only thirty-six when he died in 1719.