German Indologist, linguist and missionary Hermann Gundert was born on this day in Stuttgart. He was the maternal grandfather of novelist Herman Hesse.
Gundert studied Hebrew, Latin, English and French and later Sanskrit, in Germany. At 22, he left for India. On the ship, he began to learn Bengali and Hindi. According to one account, he was engaged as a private tutor in Calcutta, but landed in Madras.
He wrote several books in Malayalam. He was also proficient in Tamil and Telugu. He would go on to compile a Malayalam grammar book, Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam (1859), and a Malayalam-English dictionary (1872).
He spent decades on a translation of the Bible into Malayalam. A major part of his work was conducted from Tellicherry in Kerala.
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