Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Tranquebar, Tharangambadi - Unknown History

Blogging after a very long time… though I wanted to write very frequently..:)

I wanted to write about Tranquebar (Tharangambadi in Tamil) in Nagapattinam District. I didn’t know that there is so much history behind this place. Each and every place in India has its own history. When you read on such histories you will feel “oops we didn’t know this for many years”.

I didn’t know that Tharangambadi is a Danish colony long before (1620 - 1845) which was a busy port in those years. Two Lutherans - Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau were playing major role to establish Danish colony in Tranquebar and it was later taken by British. It is said only Danish were the first for protestant missionaries in India.


Do you know who were the first to enter India and establish their colonies, its Portuguese (Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut on May 20, 1498) from then foreign colonies started growing in India.


This image will give you very clear idea on European settlements in India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:European_settlements_in_India_1501-1739.png

My post looks more like a history article.. :)

2 comments:

Balaji S Rajan said...

That was a good info. Good to know about the first settlers. The picture of Munnar in your earlier post is beautiful. Keep blogging.

oskeladden said...

The Tharangambadi settlement also produced one of the earliest books printed in Tamil - a translation of the Bible commissioned by the Danish state church. If you're interested in that sort of thing, there's a picture of the first page
on Wikipedia. Tamil was written rather differently in those days, as you can see.

 
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