Ernest Trumpp (13 March 1828 – 5 April 1885) was a Christian missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society. He was also German professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Munich and a

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

. With an intent to convert the populace of western un-divided India to Christianity, he was seconded and sent to the Sindh and

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising a ...

region (

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...

). He first came to India in the 1850s and published scholarly work on the Sindhi and other western subcontinental languages. He also worked to translate the

Sikh scriptures The principal Sikh scripture is the Adi Granth (First Scripture), more commonly called the Guru Granth Sahib. The second most important scripture of the Sikhs is the Dasam Granth. Both of these consist of text which was written or authorised by th ...

to help Christian missionaries to understand Sikhs and thereby aid their conversion. He authored the first Sindhi grammar entitled ''Sindhi Alphabet and Grammar''. He also published ''Grammar of Pashto, or language of the Afghans, compared with the Iranian and North Indian idioms''. One of his controversial works was based on an 8-year study of the Sikh scriptures, where he attempted to philologically analyze and translate a significant portion of the

Guru Granth Sahib The Guru Granth Sahib ( pa, ਗੁਰੂ ਗ੍ਰੰਥ ਸਾਹਿਬ, ) is the central holy religious scripture of Sikhism, regarded by Sikhs as the final, sovereign and Guru Maneyo Granth, eternal Guru following the lineage of the Sikh gur ...

into English in the 1870s. Trumpp was limited in his knowledge of sub-continent languages to a few that he had studied, while the Granth Sahib was composed using multiple languages of the South Asia region. Hence, numerous discrepancies appear in his partial translations, which were rejected by the mainstream Sikhs. Many observers of the faith (Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims) regarded his introductory remarks to his translation as "extremely offensive". According to the Indologist Mark Juergensmeyer, criticism of Trumpp's translation was also, in part, due to discussions only with Nirmala Sikhs and not with mainstream Sikh scholars. However, setting aside Ernest Trumpp's nasty remarks, he was a German linguistic and his years of scholarship, translations, as well as field notes and discussions have been used by contemporary scholars with caution.

Biography

Trumpp was born on 13 March 1828 at

Ilsfeld Ilsfeld is a municipality in the district of Heilbronn in Baden-Württemberg in Germany, on the outer edge of the Stuttgart Metropolitan Region. In addition to the village of Ilsfeld proper, it includes the formerly independent settlements of Aue ...

in Wurtemberg Province (now

Baden-Württemberg Baden-Württemberg (; ), commonly shortened to BW or BaWü, is a German state () in Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the southern part of Germany's western border with France. With more than 11.07 million inhabitants across a ...

) in Germany. He became the Regius Professor of

Oriental Languages A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Tur ...

at the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...

and member of

Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences Royal may refer to: People * Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name * A member of a royal family Places United States * Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community * Royal, Illinois, a village * Royal, Iowa, a c ...

. Around 1854 he arrived in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

as a missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society to study the

languages of India Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes known ...

and to prepare grammars and glossaries for use by Christian missionaries. There he was initially stationed at the

Karachi Karachi (; ur, ; ; ) is the most populous city in Pakistan and 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 20 million. It is situated at the southern tip of the country along the Arabian Sea coast. It is the former c ...

mission, where he learnt the

Sindhi language Sindhi ( ; , ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language, withou ...

. Later, he was stationed at

Peshawar Peshawar (; ps, پېښور ; hnd, ; ; ur, ) is the sixth most populous city in Pakistan, with a population of over 2.3 million. It is situated in the north-west of the country, close to the International border with Afghanistan. It is ...

, where he studied the

Pashto language Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...

. He went back to Germany in 1860. In the 1870s, he was subsequently recommended by Robert Needham Cust and sought by the Secretary of State for India of the British government to return to India, and work on translations of

Sikh scripture The principal Sikh scripture is the Adi Granth (First Scripture), more commonly called the Guru Granth Sahib. The second most important scripture of the Sikhs is the Dasam Granth. Both of these consist of text which was written or authorised by th ...

in Lahore (Punjab). He published a number of works related to Sindhi and Punjabi languages and texts throughout the 1870s. He died in 1885.

Work

While at Karachi, he translated the ''

Book of Common Prayer The ''Book of Common Prayer'' (BCP) is the name given to a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion and by other Christian churches historically related to Anglicanism. The original book, published in 1549 in the reign ...

'' into the

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken a ...

in 1858. In 1866 he edited and published

Shah Jo Risalo ''Shah Jo Risalo'' ( sd, شاھ جو رسالو) is a poetic compendium of famous Sindhi Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. In fact, it is many compendia, for Shah Abdul Latif's poetry in various forms of bayt and wai was compiled by many of hi ...

, a poetic compendium of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. He published the first Sindhi grammar entitled ''Sindhi Alphabet and Grammar'' in 1872. He published ''Grammar of the Pushtoo, or language of the Afghans, compared with the Iranian and North Indian idioms'' in 1873. After he returned to Württemberg in 1876, he dedicated most of his energies to translation.

Sikh scriptures

Robert Needham Cust Robert Needham Cust (24 February 1821 – 27 October 1909) was a British administrator and judge in colonial India apart from being an Anglican evangelist and linguist. He was part of the Orientalism movement and active within the British and F ...

, a British colonial administrator and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, suggested Court of Directors of the

British East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and South ...

on 12 August 1857 that India office in London should make arrangements for translation of

Adi Granth The Guru Granth Sahib ( pa, ਗੁਰੂ ਗ੍ਰੰਥ ਸਾਹਿਬ, ) is the central holy religious scripture of Sikhism, regarded by Sikhs as the final, sovereign and eternal Guru following the lineage of the ten human gurus of the re ...

into English language. Later, Robert Needham recommended Ernest Trumpp to the British government as best qualified to translate the Sikh scripture and historic literature. In 1869, Trumpp was sought by the India office of the British government to work in

to translate the

into English. Trumpp enthusiastically started studying and translating them in 1870. He sought the help of local Nirmala Sikhs as he considered them more literate than other Sikh preachers. Nirmala Sikhs were students of Sanskrit who followed the vedic traditions and their interpretations of Adi Granth were based on vedic literature. However, after his initial effort, he stated that Sikh scriptures were not worth translating in full, because "the same few ideas, he thought, being endlessly repeated". He found that the Sikh granthis who recited the text in the early 1870s lacked comprehension and its sense of meaning. He stated that "Sikhs had lost all learning" and the granthis were misleading. Even for Sikhs the language of the Guru Granth Sahib is considered archaic and hard to understand without an interpreter. Trumpp never made any attempts to have a meaningful dialogue with Sikh scholars of the time such as Kahn Singh Nabha, who has penned the Mahan Kosh, a dictionary of words used in the Granth Sahib. According to Tony Ballantyne, Ernest Trumpp's insensitive approach such as treating the Sikh scripture as a mere book and blowing cigar smoke over its pages while studying the text, did not endear him to the Sikh granthis who worshipped it as an embodiment of the Guru. Trumpp, after eight years of study and research of the Sikh scriptures, published his translation and field notes. In the Introduction section, he described the Sikh scripture as "incoherent and shallow in the extreme, and couched at the same time in dark and perplexing language, in order to cover these defects. It is for us Occidentals a most painful and almost stupefying task, to read only a single Rag". Trumpp criticized Adi Granth to be lacking systematic unity, according to Arvind Pal Singh Mandair – a Sikhism scholar. Trumpp said that Sikhism was "a reform movement in spirit", but "completely failed to achieve anything of real religious significance". He concluded that the most Sikhs do not understand what their scripture's verses mean and any metaphysical speculations therein. The Sikh intelligentsia he met during his years of study, stated Trumpp, only had a "partial understanding" of their own scripture. Most Sikhs neither observe the rahit-nama – the Sikh code of conduct, nor were the popular notions of the Sikhs guided by the teachings in the Adi Granth. It was more of a military brotherhood with a martial spirit, inspired by a "deep fanatical hatred" for the Muslims given the Sikh sense of their history and identity. According to the Sikh historian Trilochan Singh, Trumpp's colonial era study and remarks were "extremely vulgar attacks" on Sikhism that did not appreciate the Sikh history, culture and religion and it reflected the lack of scientific-analytical method in his approach. His criticism reflected the bias of his missionary agenda, which assumed that ancient Christian scriptures were coherent, had the right answers, and that all other religions must be held in contempt. Trumpp's introduction to his translations of Adi Granth reveal that he had a contempt for the scripture and its theology, states the Sikhism scholar J. S. Grewal. According to Indologist Mark Juergensmeyer, setting aside Ernest Trumpp's nasty remarks, he was a linguist and his years of scholarship, translations, as well as field notes and discussions have been used by contemporary scholars with caution.

Other Sikh texts

In the course of his research, it seems he had discovered the first known

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in ...

of the Puratan Janamsakhis (also spelt Janam-sakhi), the earliest known biography of

Guru Nanak Gurū Nānak (15 April 1469 – 22 September 1539; Gurmukhi: ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ; pronunciation: , ), also referred to as ('father Nānak'), was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. His birth is celebrated w ...

, at the India office Library, London. Trumpp found these manuscripts among the manuscripts forwarded to him from the India office's Library in 1872 with a note saying "in hope that some of them may be useful in the project entrusted to you." He translated Puratan and Bala

Janamsakhis The Janamsakhis ( pa, ਜਨਮਸਾਖੀ, IAST: ''Janam-sākhī'', ''lit.'' ''birth stories''), are legendary biographies of Guru Nanak – the founder of Sikhism. Popular in the Sikh history, these texts are considered by scholars as imaginar ...

, the lives of the later ikhgurus, including an account of their teachings. He also penned some essays on ''The Life of Nanak according to the Janam Sakhis'', ''Sketch of the Life of the other Sikh Gurus'', ''Sketch of the Religion of the Sikhs'', ''On the Composition of the Granth'', and ''On the Language and the Metres used in the Granth''.

Publications

* ''Afghânistan und die Afghânen.'' In: ''Allgemeine Zeitung'' 1878. * ''Grammar of the Sindhi Language''. * ''A Sindhi Reading-Book in the Sanscrit and Arabic Character''. * ''Grammar of the Pastō Or Language of the Afghāns, Compared with the Īrānian and North-Indian Idiom''. * ''Dictionary of Bengali Language 2 Vols.'' * ''The Ādi Granth: Or, the Holy Scriptures of the Sikhs''. * ''Kampf Adams''. * ''Die Religion der Sikhs''. * ''Das Taufbuch der Aethiopischen Kirche: Aetiopisch und Deutsch''. * ''Einleitung in das Studium der Arabischen Grammatiker''.

References

External links

Grammar of the Singhi Language
Ernest Trumpp (1872)
Trumpp's partial translation of Adi Granth
Ernest Trumpp (1877) {{DEFAULTSORT:Trumpp, Ernest 1828 births 1885 deaths German Anglican missionaries German philologists Sindhi language Anglican missionaries in India People from Heilbronn (district) Missionary linguists German expatriates in India Recipients of Latif Award