ABSTRACT
Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau had not come to Tranquebar to serve the Europeans or to study India even though, in 1713, Ziegenbaig would produce the best scholarship on India's religions for many decades, unpublished until 1867. Ziegenbalg and Pluetschau had been commissioned to spread the good news', and to do it effectively they first had to study the relevant languages. Both studied Portuguese, and Ziegenbalg also took up Tamil, drawing upon the linguistic and literary learning of Velalans belonging to the high-status Malabarian 'aristocracy.' Ziegenbalg gleaned further insights into 'heathen darkness' from that elderly Velalan. The two of them reveal an intriguing Velalan-European interaction. By October the two Pietists had been in Tranquebar for four months, and 'Heathens' like the upadhyayan must have found them intriguing. They were a new type of European. By 1732 the Tranquebar Evangelical mission consisted of 1,478 members: 287 were 'Portuguese', 546 were Malabarians, and 645 resided in the kingdom of Tanjore.
