Hermann Gundert

Hermann Gundert (Stuttgart, 4 February 1814 – 25 April 1893) was a German missionary, scholar, and linguist, as well as the maternal grandfather of German novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. Gundert is chiefly known for his contributions as an Indologist, and compiled a Malayalam grammar book, Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam (1859), in which he developed and constricted the grammar spoken by the Malayalis, nowadays; a Malayalam-English dictionary (1872), and contributed to work on Bible translations into Malayalam. He worked primarily at Tellicherry on the Malabar coast, in present day Kerala, India. Gundert also contributed to the fields of history, geography and astronomy. Gundert gave the famous epithet "God's own country" to Kerala seeing the beauty of the land while he traveled from Kunnamkulam to Mangalore on a boat.

Early years

Hermann Gundert was born to Ludwig Gundert and Christiana Enslin, and was the couple's third child. 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. T. L. Strange, a British judge, offered his bungalow on Illikkunnu near Tellicherry to the Basel Mission on condition that a mission station will be established over there. The Gunderts moved there and took up work in April 1839. In August 1839, Gundert stated that he had studied Malayalam intensively and that he had established the first Malayalam school on the veranda of the bungalow in May. At the same time, his wife started the first girls' institute with boarding. In the following months, Gundert opened Malayalam schools in Kadirur, Thalassery Fort, Mahe, and Dharmadam. Regularly he visited all these schools and invited the teachers to Illikkunnu for further education.

At times Gundert had five Pandits in his house, discussing old Indian history, philosophy and religion and studying classical Indian literature.

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. During this period, he published around thirteen books in Malayalam. 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. These grammars were the prominent non-Sanskrit-based approaches to real Indian grammar.

Gundert is held in high regard to this day among linguistic experts in Kerala for the high scholastic aptitude exhibited in his work.

Scholarly work

thumb|Gundert's statue near [[Thalassery Stadium]]

During his stay in Illikunnu near Tellicherry (Thalassery), he published around thirteen books in Malayalam including a translation of the Bible, Old Testament from Hebrew and New Testament from Greek. The archives of information he collected from Tellicherry are kept in the University of Tübingen and were collected and compiled by the scholar Dr. Scaria Zacharia as Thalassery Rekhakal.

In Kerala, he took a deep interest in the local culture and the Malayalam language, attempting a systematic grammar of the language. This was one of the prominent non-Sanskrit-based approaches to Indic grammar. Gundert considered Malayalam to have diverged from Proto-Tamil–Malayalam, or Proto-Dravidian. Apart from the early inscriptions found on copper and stone, Gundert traced Malayalam to the Rāma Charitam, a poem predating the Sanskrit alphabet.

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

Publications

{| class="wikitable"

!Year published !! Title !! Description

| 1843 || Keralolpathi || Origin of Kerala, translation from Malayalam Keralolpathi.

| 1845 || Pazhancholmala || String of Malayalam proverbs for Christian theological idioms.

| 1851 || Malayala Bhasha Viyakaranam || Malayalam Grammar

| 1860 || Paathamala || First textbook in Malayalam

| 1868 || Kerala pazhama ||33 years of Malayali history, from Vasco da Gama's arrival in 1498 (an English translation has been published by T Madhava Menon in 2003)

| 1868 || New Testament || Translation of the New Testament in Malayalam

| 1870 || School Dictionary ||

| 1872 || Malayalam-English Dictionary ||

| 1879 || Malayalarajyam || The land of Malayalam

| 1847 June || Rajyasamacharam (News of the Kingdom) || Newspaper

| 1847 October || Paschimodayam || "Rise of the West" or "Dawn of the West", a magazine

| 1881 || Sankeerthanangal || "The Book of Psalms" translated by Gundert

Other contributions

He was the one who introduced the punctuation marks – full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, and question mark – into the Malayalam language.
Malayalam-English Dictionary. He returned to Germany in 1859. There he took ten more years to complete the dictionary. (1872)

Though Gundert came to Kerala as a missionary, he is remembered today mainly for his literary contributions. In the city of Thalassery (Tellicherry), he has been honored with a statue. The bungalow in which he used to live remained the home of the Nettur Technical Training Foundation (NTTF) for many years. In 2022 The Tourism Department of Kerala converted the Gundert Bungalow into a museum that sheds light on the life and contributions of Hermann Gundert.

References

External links

Hermann Gundert Society (in English)
Hermann Gundert