Danish India

Tranquebar

The Danish East India Company obtained Tranquebar from the Nayak of Thanjavur in 1620 and built Fort Dansborg there. As a trading venture it was marginal. As a base for activity the other European powers forbade, it mattered a great deal.

In 1706 Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau arrived as the first Protestant missionaries in India, sent under Danish auspices. Ziegenbalg learned Tamil, set up a printing press, and produced in 1715 the first book printed in Tamil type and the first Tamil translation of the New Testament. He also wrote a serious account of South Indian religion — the Genealogy of the South Indian Gods — based on conversations with Tamil informants and on texts they gave him, which his own mission society suppressed on the ground that missionaries were sent to uproot heathenism, not to describe it. It was published a century and a half later.

Serampore

The Danish settlement at Serampore, above Calcutta, offered the same shelter. William Carey and the Baptist missionaries, whom the East India Company would not permit to operate in its territory, established themselves there in 1800. The Serampore press produced translations of the Bible into some forty Indian languages, the first Bengali newspaper, and the first printing in Bengali type of Indian literature — including the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.

Carey's Bengali prose work, and the press's activity generally, are conventionally treated as a starting point for the modern Bengali literary language, whatever one makes of the missionary purpose behind it. Serampore College, founded in 1818, was chartered by the Danish king to grant degrees and is among the oldest such institutions in Asia.

Denmark sold Serampore in 1839 and Tranquebar and the remaining settlements in 1845.