Alexandro Valignano
The famous Italian Jesuit Alexandro Valignano, Visitor for India and Japan
(1573-83), Provincial of India (1583-87) and again visitor until his death in
1606, arrived in Goa in 1574.
The following year he visited the Pearl Fishery Coast of
Tamilnad and took with him to Gon Fr. Henrique Henriques. The Provincial
Congregation of the Jesuits in India was held in Goa in 1575. There it was
decided among other things that various works of instruction should be prepared
for the native Christians including (1) a Catechism, (2) a Confessionary, (3) a
Christian Doctrine and (4) a Book of Lives of Saints.
Valignano, who presided over the meeting, deplored the
fact that not even a short catechism was available to the native Christians.'
Of course there was the Cartilha 2 containing a short Tamil Catechism printed
in Lisbon in 1554. But as it was in Roman characters it was of no use to the
Tamil Paravas. So Valignano ordered Fr. Henriques to prepare those four books
in Tamil, and to make it convenient for him to do that work, he relieved him of
his job of Jesuit Superior over the Pearl Fishery Coast (Pescaria was the term
the Portuguese used for this region), an office he held for over twenty years.
Henriques refers to this order in his Spanish preface to his Tamil Flos: "
And so by the order of the same Provincial (Valignano), I kept busy composing
some books in the same language which were afterwards printed."
Dr. Joam Gonsalves
Further Valignano enjoined on the Jesuit lay-brother Joam Gonsalves the
difficult task of making the Tamil types. Gonsalves, whom some call a
Portuguese while others call him a Spaniard,3 was born in 1525, entered
the Society of Jesus in Lisbon in 1555, took the simple vows in Goa in 1557 and
was there in 1575 as a kind of smith, ` Prefectus fabricae domesticae et faber
ferrarius'. Being in feeble health he was prematurely worn out and died in
1578.4 That is all we know about the man who made the first types in
Tamil. To help him with the design of the Tamil types, Pero Luis, the first
Indian Jesuit, went to Goa. Concerning this work of Gonsalves, Henriques has
the following in the same preface: Moreover on the advice of the Father
Provincial of India, a Brother of the Society, who before joining it was a high
Government official, succeeded in making a Malabar printing press, working
diligently with his own hand and at the cost of great labour". 5 We
have an exact impression of those letters on the last page of Thampiran:
கோவையில்
உண்டாக்கின எழுத்து (koovaiyil untaakkina ezhuththu): 'Esta letra se
fez em Goa: no ano de LXXVII' (These letters were made in Goa in 1577) 6 We
have given a photastat of that page in the Tamil Flos we edited
(p.xxiii). Surely some book or other must have been printed with those
letters made by Joam Gonsalves. Sacchini in his history of the Society of Jesus
says that already in 1577 a Catechism in Tamil was printed with the types made
by Br. Gonsalves, whom he calls a Spaniard.7 This is confirmed by
contemporary evidence of IIenriques, who writes from Tuticorin on December,
1577, saying that the Malabar (Tamil) catechism was being printed thanks to the
endeavours of the Visitor.8 Unfortunately no such printed book has come
down to us.
Joam de Faria
The earliest printed books we have are printed not with the types of Br.
Gonsalves but with those made by Fr. J. Faria in Quilon in the following year
(i.e. 1578). These letters of Faria are placed below the letters of Br.
Gonsalves on the same page we referred to above, obviously to show the
improvement over them. They have the heading: " Letra feita em Coulam: no
ano de LXXVIII " (" These letters were made in Quilon in 1578: கொல்லத்தில்
உண்டாக்கின எழுத்து - kollathil untaakkina ezhuththu). These letters are
definitely better than those made in Goa and all the three books (Thampiraan
vaNakkam, Kiriicitlathiyaani vartakkam, and the Tamil Flos Sanctorum, whose
Tamil title has been lost) have been printed with these types.
We have re-edited these works and shall say something about
them later. Fr. Thani Nayagam has written a fine article on these books.9 We
do not know much about Faria.10
Fr. Schurhammer gives the following details: He entered the
Society (of Jesus) in 1563, studied Latin for four years and moral theology one
year and was ordained priest in Goa in 1575 at the age of thirty-six. According
to the historian Sommervogel 11 Faria was born in 1539, arrived in
Goa about 1572 and died there in 1581. We know that the Tamil Flos was printed
in 1586, as the preface testifies to that fact. After the death of Faria, Fr.
John de Bustamente, who, according to the historian Wicki,l2 was in India
from 1563 under the name of Rodrigues, might have printed it. What happened to
the Tamil press after his death, we do not know. Perhaps the Dutch destroyed
it. For two centuries there is no printing until it is resumed in Ambalacat by
Ignacio Archamon, an Indian mechanic.
However the printing is poorer than the one we find in the sixteenth century,
because the types used are made of wood, whereas the first types made by
Gonsalves and Faria were metallic. It is in these wooden types that the first
three volumes of Nobili's Catechism were printed as well as the
Tamil-Portuguese dictionary of Fr. Proenga. This may be easily verified by
looking at the photostats we have of those volumes as well as by looking at the
Tamil-Portuguese dictionary edited by Fr. Thani Nayagam in photostat form.13
Henrique Henriques
So far we spoke about the effort of Valignano to edit Tamil books: on the one
hand he ordered Fr. Henriques to write the books and on the other he asked Br.
Joam Gonsalves to prepare the types; Faria and Bustamente continued the work
left undone by Gonsalves.
Now we shall speak of the part Henriques played in the
printing work. The Tamil press owes its beginning so much to him that he may be
called the "father of the Tamil Press". He it was who collected the
necessary funds from the Paravas, who generously contributed 400 cruzados
towards it; l4 he sent also the first Indian Jesuit, Pero Luis. to
Goa to give the design for the Tamil letters; he wrote several books and got
them printed with great care; not all of them have come down to us but we are
sure that at least four were printed: Thampiramr vaNakkarn, Kiriiciththiyaani
valvakkam, Confessionario (in Tamil: Kompeciyoonaayaru), and the Flos Sanctorum
in Tamil, whose title has not come down to us, though we have the whole book.
Here we shall give a short account of the man who is so much responsible for
the Tamil press and who was the first westerner to make a systematic study of
the Tamil language.
Henriques was born at Vila Vicosa in Portugal in 1520. He
joined the Franciscans but had to leave them as he was descended from Jewish
parents. He studied Canon Law in the University of Coimbra till 1545. Then he
joined the Society of Jesus as a deacon after leaving to the poor his property,
which amounted to 4,000 crusados. He was ordained
priest in the following year and sailed for Goa. There lie remained till the
beginning of 1547, when St. Francis Xavier sent him to look after the
Christians of the Fishery Coast. Here he spent all his life except for brief
intervals. He died at Punnaikayal on February 6, 1600. The Jesuit Annual Letter
for 1601 has this about him: 15
" In the Church of Tutucurim is buried our good Fathar
Anrique Anriques, who died last year. He was one of' the first Fathers that
came to this Coast and was like an Apostle of this whole Christian community.
The devotion which these Christians have for him is so great that I cannot
describe it. There is nothing to wonder at the Christians doing this, who were
brought up by him and and nurtured in the Faith for so many years, when the
Moors and the Hindus who were not such beneficiaries, showed and go on showing
him so great a devotion that one cannot but praise the Lord for it. At Puncali
(Punnaikayal) further they consider their oath most solemn and binding when
they swear by Father Anriques. Moreover on the day he died all the Muslims of
the neighbouring village Patanam (Kayalpattanam) fasted; the Hindus also of
the neighbouring places fasted two days and closed all their shops and bazaars
to express their grief over the death of the good and holy old man. So great
was the respect and consideration every one had concerning his holiness."
When his body was taken to Tuticorin "in his company
went seven tonis full of people and at the landing it was hard work to remcw c
the multitude on account of the great concourse of these that wanted to touch
the corpse with their rosaries and tried to get something of' him to keep it as
relic." There is no doubt that he was buried in the church of our Lady of
Snows at Tuticorin. But as there were many wars and violent changes during
which Churches were destroyed, w c are not able to locate his grave. Perhaps
the bones which were I:cpt in a glass case and are still preserved in that
church are his.
Thanks to his literary activity Henriques has gained for
himself a permanent and an important place in Tamil literature. He was the
first grammarian of the spoken dialect. Many people imagine that Fr. Beschi was
the first to write such a grammar; few know that before Beschi there were
people like Ziegenbalg, Balthasar da Costa, Fr. Aguilar and Henrique Henriques.
Henriques was also the first lexicographer. All the
missionaries who came immediately after him made use of the grammar and
dictionary written by Fr. Henrique,. He presided over a school of Tamil studies
and taught the foreigners Tamil in a systematic way. Though his dictionary and
grammar arc not now available, his printed works which remain, the first of
tile kind in Tamil, will always be remembered and treasured with pride and
affection. It will be interesting to know how this great man picked up Tamil so
well. Happily for us we have an account of it from his own mouth recorded in a
letter he writes from Vembar dated 31-10-1548 to St. Ignatius.
" Since Father Master Francis orders me to give you a
minute account of' myself, let your Reverence know that as soon as I came to
this Coast, 1 began to learn to speak and read the language, but it wits so
difficult that I despaired of ever being able to master it, and so I gave it up
and on account of the difficulty. I always used a topaz (interpreter). So
when Father Master Francis came from the Moluccas in the month of February
1548, I did not know more than two words of Tamil. At that time my interpreter
having left me to attend to other business I decided to learn the language, and
day and night I made it my only occupation, without however omitting to visit
the places entrusted to me, and God was pleased to help me greatly.
I discovered a sort of method to learn: Just as in Latin
they learn the conjugations, so I did in this language; I conjugated the verbs,
learning the preterites, the futures, the infinitives, subjunctives etc. This
cost me much labour; I learnt also the accusatives, genitives, datives and the
other cases. And so l came to know which is to be put first, whether the verb,
or the noun and the pronoun. I learned it all in a short time, so that when I
speak to these people in their language, they are greatly astonished that I
should have learned it in such a short time.
There are some Portuguese who for four, five or six years
have been speaking some words of the language, but when they want to use the
present they use the future, and they do not know which is which. When the
people of the country hear me speaking their language using the proper moods,
tenses, and persons. they are astonished; and they are still more amazed, when
they see that in five months I have made such progress; they say that I could
not do that by natural means.
I have learned to read and to write as well, and
Father Master Francis orders me to send you a written ola. It is now three or
four months that I do not use any interpreter. I speak and preach to them in
the same tongue, and as the pronunciation is very difficult and very different
from ours, at times all do not understand me, and therefore when I have given
an instruction in the Church, I ask some one else to repeat it in Malabar
(Tamil) and in the same words, so that all may understand better, but in a few
months with God's help, I shall not be in need of such help and I shall speak
in such a way that all will understand me. I have no interpreter here who knows
how to state clearly our doctrine; the Father says one thing, and the
interpreter often says another. . . . With God's help, I shall execute Father
Master Francis's command to make a kind of Grammar of this language, so that
the Fathers may easily learn it. I shall insert in it the conjugations and declensions,
and the rules of grammar which are very useful whether you speak through an
interpreteror ot in the language itself."
Further, in his Spanish preface to the Flos Sanctorum in
1586, he says that he has already written about Grammar: "Thirty seven years
ago, Holy Obedience sent me with other Fathers of the Society to preach and
administer the Sacraments to the said Christians; during that time I have made
a very careful study of this language with the desire of helping those
Christians; and at the cost of much labour, and by God's grace, I came to know
it well enough to write a grammar of that language."
The Tamil Calendar, which begins somewhere in April, does
not agree with the Gregorian or Julian Calendar, which is followed all over the
world, particularly in Christian liturgy. So feasts like Christmas which fall
on a definite day (Dec. 25) in the Gregorian calendar cannot be permanently
fixed on a definite day in the Tamil Calendar.
This created a problem for the early missionaries. Fr.
Henriques (1520-1600) sent by St. Francis Xavier to work among the Paravas of
the Pearl Fishery Coast was, so far as we know, the first to tackle this
problem and find out a practical solution. He examined carefully the Indian
Calendar and noted which Tamil months corresponded to which Gregorian months.
Thai, the Tamil month, more or less corresponded to January.
So he made it identical to January, giving it the same number of days and also
making it begin on the same day as January. The next month, Maaci, was made to
correspond to February and got 29 days in leap years and 28 in ordinary years.
Similarly the other months were made to correspond to each other. We give below
the table of correspondences between the calendars as given by Fr. Henriques in
his Tamil Flos Sanctorum printed in 1586.16
Thai
|
January
|
31 days
|
Aadi
|
July
|
31 days
|
Maaci
|
February
|
28 (29)
|
AavaNi
|
August
|
31
|
Pangkuni
|
March
|
31
|
Purattaci
|
September
|
30
|
Ciththirai
|
April
|
30
|
Aippaaci
|
October
|
31
|
Vaikaaci
|
May
|
31
|
Kaarththikai
|
November
|
30
|
Aani
|
June
|
30
|
Maarkazhi
|
December
|
31
|
According to this system it was very easy to fix
immovable feasts in the Tamil Calendar. Christmas fell always on Maarkazhi 25,
Assumption on AavaNi 15, Circumcision on Thai l, etc. All the missionaries who
came after him followed this system and we are told that it is still followed
in Ceylon and in coastal Churches where Henriques worked. But in the interior,
where the Hindus were in the majority, this system was never accepted and the
old Tamil calendar was the only one in use. Missionaries who were working
there, had to struggle with two different calendar without being able to find
any correspondence between them.
Father Beschi solved this problem by finding a concordance
between the two calendars in his treatise " De Annis ac Mensibus
Tamulicis" (Tamil months and years). Unless you have those tables which
Beschi gives it is impossible to find out a particular date off hand. The
system of Henriques, though not accepted by the Hindus, is very easy. Any child
can find out the Tamil date from the Roman Calendar, because it keeps the same
months with the same number of days and changes only the foreign names of the
months by the Tamil months. This system is so simple that one may wonder
whether there was any need for Fr. Henriques to formulate such a system. Here
perhaps we have a clear case of the genius finding out the obvious.
The annual letter for the year 1600 gives the following as
the work of Henriques:
(1) Lives of the Principal saints, (2) Manual for
Confession, (3) Christian Doctrine-Translation of Marcus George's book in Portuguese,
(4) A life of Christ (till the ascension). The annual letter for the following
year 1601 speaks of a few more books: (5) Tamil Grammar, (6) Tamil-Portuguese
Dictionary, (7) Another book refuting the fables of the Gentiles and in defence
of the Divine Religion. Besides these he has written about 60 letters. Their
list is given in our second edition of the Flos (pp. 706 ff.). He has also
written a treatise consisting of thirteen chapters on the " Brotherhood of
Love " (" Confraria da Caridade "), which is even now prevalent
in the coastal areas. As far as the Tamil works are concerned, only two of them
are now available, i.e. nos. (1) and (3).
There is also another book which is available, though it is
not mentioned in the list above. The name of this book is Thampiraan vaNakkam.
All the items found there are incorporated in (3), Kiriiciththiyaani vaNakkanz.
That may be the reason why it is not mentioned separately. We had the privilege
of editing Thampiraa vaNakkarrv and Kiriiciththiyaani varraklzam under the
common titlen Yarlakkam in 1963. This year (1967) we have edited (1) under the
name ATiyaar varalaatzt. The original title has been lost, as the only copy
that was available has the introductory and title pages missing. Henriques must
have spent several years on this work, as it runs to 668 printed pages. We have
added about two hundred pages of notes to the text. As Fr. Thani Nayagam has
given a detailed description of these books in the article he wrote for Tamil
Culture '17 we shall say no more about them here.
Henriques was the first European Tamil scholar we know of.
During his time there were some Portuguese who knew Tamil, like Anloni
Criminali, and Pray Joam de Condem who supervised the first Cartilha printed in
1554. Still so far as we knwo. none of them had a grasp of the Tamil language
and made a systematic study as Henriques did.
It is thanks to Henriques that we have the first Tamil
grammar of the spoken dialect; further, he it was, who compiled the first Tamil
dictionary. Moreover he conducted a school of Tamil studies at Punnaikayal and
persuaded the Portuguese to speak and write in Tamil and even to punish
themselves in case they used Portuguese words by mistake instead of Tamil
words. He collected funds for the first Tamil Press and printed Tamil books as
early as 1578. It is due to him that Tamil is privileged to be the first
non-European language to go to the press in its own characters.
Moreover he is the first prose writer in Tamil. His works
had the unique distinction of being printed in his life-time. They may not be
classics, but still they will always be treasured by all lovers of Tamil
literature, as they are the first Tamil books which were printed. By these
works and also by his devoted service in Tamil Nad for more than fifty years,
he won the hearts of the Tamil people and has merited for himself a permanent
place in Tamil literature. He will always be known as the " father of the
Tamil Press " and a pioneer in Tamil prose. Further, his works will be of
great interest to linguistics as these works are the earliest record we have of
the spoken dialect.
1 Georg Schurhammer, " The First Printing ",
Orientalia, Lisboa, 1963, p. 319.
2.This booklet has been re-edited by Dr. J. Filliozat under the title, Un
Catechisme tamoul du XVle siecle era lettres latines (Institut Franqais
d'Indologie, Pondichery, 1967)).
3 Schurhammer, op. cit., p. 317, note 2, and p. 318, note 3.
6 Ibid., p. 318, and Ariyaar varalaatu, p. xx. [ATiyaar varalaatu = g. O7rra
corrvoaflj;,%rb (ed.), A6darrq_4wa Aul.a6rrrrr'r 0wb,rr~w Flos Sanctorum 6rsbrp
wul.wrrri ar7Gurr,9; ,5relbb ar2l6uA@w& ffbDarb. &TAUa*5r4-. 1967.1
5 Ariyaar varalaatu, p. LXX.
6. Ibid., p. xxiii.
7. Schurhammer, p. 316, note 2.
8. Ibid., p. 319.
9 Xavier S.Thaninayagam " The First Books printed in Tamil ", TC VII
(1958), pp. 288-308.
10.Schurhammer, p. 318.
11. Ibid.
12. Ariyaar varalaatu, p. xx.
13. Anttao de Procenca's Tamil-Portuguese Dictionary, A.D.. 1679, prepared for
publication by Xavier S. Thani Nayagam, Department of Indian Studies,
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, 1966.
14.Schurhammer, p. 319.
15.Ariyaar varalaatu, p. xii.
16.Ariyaar varalaatu, p. 668.
17. see note 9.
