The Hindu : Kerala News : Hot on Gundert’s trail

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Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
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Kerala

Kerala

Hot on Gundert’s trail

Dr. Frenz, who has studied deeply on Hermann Gundert’s work in Kerala, reveals some interesting details of the scholar.

Albrecht Frenz

With every visit to Kerala and North Malabar, Albrecht Frenz is fascinated more and more by the works and personality of Hermann Gundert, the German scholar who came to Malabar as a missionary.

Dr. Frenz, who is here for the release of his book ‘Future in Remembrance,’ which he co-authored with his youngest son Stephan, spoke about his quest for details of the scholar, who complied the first Malayalam-English lexicon.

Gundert was a brilliant linguist and had put in extraordinary effort in compiling the lexicon, he says, adding that the anecdotes he hears of the missionary here amazes him. “During a visit, I arrived at the Kottayam Railway Station one night. I had to reach Thalassery next morning. The station master told me that the last train for Thalassery had gone. When he learnt that I was compiling material on Gundert, he related an anecdote about how the German had spent days to get the information for the lexicon. Gundert was different from first generation missionaries. He would alight from his horse if he saw a farmer and spend the day gathering information. When he finished his queries, the horse would have strayed and disappeared. By the time the station master finished, we had drunk innumerable cups of tea. Such was the openness with which people received us,” he recalls.

All in the family

What had inspired him to research on Gundert and his works?

“That is difficult to answer. Even at the age of seven I wanted to go to India for no explicable reason. I started studying Vedic Sanskrit when I was 19 at Goettingen University from where I got a doctorate,” says Dr. Frenz who is married to Gertraud, a fifth generation Gundert. This link to the Gundert family facilitated deeper research on the German scholar, a prolific writer. Dr. Frenz could gather details from the latter’s diary, letters that came to 22,000 pages and more than 300 articles.

Works on Gundert

Dr. Frenz has authored innumerable publications on a wide range of subjects including ‘Hermann Malabar Diary from 1837 to 1859’ along with Scaria Zacharia, ‘Hermann Gundert and Reports from Malabar’, ‘Hermann Gundert Calver Diary 1859-1893’ (edited) and ‘Yoga in Christianity’.

He has also translated ‘Tirukural’ and ‘Manikkavasagam’ from Tamil to German along with Lalitambal and Nagarajan besides co-authoring ‘Wall Paintings in North Kerala’ with Krishna Kumar Marar in 2004.

From the mid-seventies Dr. Frenz has been visiting India. He was lecturer in German at the Madurai Kamaraj University. He has delivered the Gundert Memorial lecture at the Calicut University in 1979.

Maleeha Raghaviah

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