Today, settling down for even a nine-hour flight requires keeping some reading material aside. Perhaps a book or two. For Hermann Gundert, a German missionary traveling to Calcutta from Bristol in the 1830s, the journey time took nine months. Instead of a couple of books, he decided to pick up a couple of languages – Bengali and Telugu (perhaps even Hindustani).
Learning the language of the country you’re visiting is normally always fruitful, but alas – Hermann’s ship disembarked at Chennai instead, where the lingua Franca was Tamil. Undeterred, he studied Tamil, developing a keen ear for local dialects. Traveling South India, he settled on Telicherry, Kerala, to spend 20 years in. Of course, he then learned Malayalam.
He soon got to writing. In 1847, he published Kerala’s first newspaper ‘Rajya Samacharam’. He would later produce the first lexicographical study of Malayalam grammar and its words. In 1859, he published Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam, a book on the grammar of Malayalam. His defining work was to come in 1871-1872.
Says professor M.G.S. Narayanan, former chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research:
He became such an expert that he produced a dictionary. An English Malayalam dictionary which is the standard dictionary even today. It’s a different kind of a dictionary, in that he collected not only the literary words, but the common sayings in the streets, among the fishermen and places he went, and all the colloquial words in oral language.
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