BETTER THAN AN EGYPTIAN PYRAMID:
Cotton Mather, Elihu Yale, and the Tamil New Testament (1721)
Exactly when did Americans first come in contact with India? That depends on how we define “American” and “contact.” Technically anyone (of European ancestry) born in the American colonies prior to the Treaty of Paris (1784) was first and foremost a British subject, and only secondarily an American. But for the sake of this story let’s just say they were Americans in their heart of hearts; after all, they eventually did stir up all that trouble, just like good Americans are expected to when confronted with an unpopular government, in the 1770s. And let’s further agree that “contact” can either mean going to India in person, or having a little piece of India delivered to your doorstep.
With these comfortably loose-fitting definitions of “American” and “contact,” we can then find an interesting pair of Indian encounters way back around 1720. Both involved a man by the name of Cotton Mather. Mather is remembered nowadays, if at all, as someone somehow mixed up with the infamous Salem witch trials. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries however, he was an well-known and influential Puritan minister and author, not only in the colonial boondocks but in England as well. While many of us don’t have the time or energy to write out our shopping list, Mather in his life authored over 450 books and pamphlets on subjects ranging from witchcraft to theology, from history to astronomy and biology.
Enrolled in Harvard (where his father Increase served two terms as president) at age 12, already conversant in Latin and Greek, Mather graduated at 15, earned his MA at 18, an age when most of us are still struggling to get out of high school. A deeply religious yet tortured soul, given to long self-mortifying fasts and vigils, he was ordained at 21 and ministered at Boston’s Old North Church for 44 years, until his death in 1728. Some historians have downplayed or even ignored Mather’s role in the witch trials of the 1690s, which resulted in 19 hangings, one gruesome rock-crushing, and hundreds of ruined lives. But the fact is he fanned the hysteria’s flames, writing (in The Wonders of the Invisible World) that the “witches” were agents of a devilish conspiracy to “Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country.” After all the damage was done and the madness ended, it seems that Mather had second thoughts, but it was too late to save either the broken lives or his own reputation. More than 200 years after his death, in the 1970s, he was resurrected as the menacing “Hatemonger” in several issues of a popular comic book, his weapon a flame-throwing wooden cross.
One of Mather’s pet projects was a struggling college, the Collegiate School of Connecticut, located at Saybrook. He and nine other Puritan ministers, all Harvard grads, established the school in 1701 as a conservative alternative to their increasingly liberal-minded alma mater. There’s also a suggestion that the CSC was Mather’s way of thumbing his nose at Harvard, miffed because he was passed over for its presidency. But the 10 directors weren’t satisfied with the Saybrook campus and decided to move the school to New Haven, after the town, in a bidding war with Hartford, agreed to chip in £2,000 for moving expenses.
Even with that seed money the CSC remained impoverished–its students were boarded with their professors–and needed funds for a new New Haven building. So the Puritans cast about for a benefactor and finally targeted a wealthy Englishman by the name of Elihu Yale.
According to our criterion, Yale was just barely an American. He was born in Boston in 1649 though his family moved to England three years later and he never set foot in this country again. He went out to India in 1672 as a lowly “writer” or clerk for the East India Company. (See Sidelight) Through diligence and hard work, and a very advantageous marriage to a wealthy widow, by 1687 Yale had risen to the office of Governor of Madras. During his years in India he accumulated a sizeable fortune of his own, not a bad thing in itself, but there were and still are lingering questions about how he managed it. Sympathizers credit him with being (like his father) a shrewd businessman who made money trading in diamonds and spices. But there were charges, which historians have never been able to prove conclusively, that he also stuck his hand in the Company cookie jar and that some of his gains were ill-gotten. So depending on who you believe, either he had enemies on the governing Council who undermined his position with Company directors, or those directors wearied of his of his shady wheelings and dealings. Whatever the truth, Yale was kicked out of office in 1692.
Apparently he didn’t think he did anything wrong. In an attempt to get his job back, he dispatched his younger brother Thomas to London to plead his case to the British government’s powerful Privy Council. But Thomas died in 1697 without success, and Yale decided enough was enough. So in 1699 he returned to England, hauling along (according to one report) five tons of spices, precious stones, leather goods, and oriental screens.
Retired in style to his family’s homeland in Wales, Yale set out to spend his money. He assembled the largest private art collection in the country, and handed out handouts left and right. Naturally this largesse attracted widespread attention, even in the distant colony which he briefly, a long time past, called home. In 1713 he was approached by a representative of a very small and hard-up college in Connecticut, Mather’s CSC, and was talked into donating about 30 books to its library.
Five years later, the Puritans were after something more substantial than 30 books when they hat-in-hand again to Yale. And who better than Mather to write the pitch?
The Colony of Connecticut [he wrote], having for some years had a College at Saybrook without a collegious way of living for it, have lately begun to erect a large edifice for it in the town of New Haven. The charge of that expensive building is not yet all paid, nor are there yet any funds of revenues for salaries to the Professors and instructors to the society.
Sir, though you have your felicities in your family, which I pray God continue and multiply, yet certainly, if what is ... forming at New Haven might wear the name of YALE COLLEGE, it would be better than a name of sons and daughters. And your munificense might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name, as would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid.
Mather was offering a tit for a tat: if Yale would donate funds to help complete the construction project, Mather might get the college named after him. As a kicker, Mather hinted that since Yale’s only legitimate son had died years before, the college then would perpetuate his “valuable name” not only better than children, but even “better than an Egyptian pyramid.”
The idea appealed to Yale, but as a rabid Anglican, he had reservations about propping up a bunch of Puritans. So instead of hard cash Yale donated several bales of textiles, just over 400 books, mostly on religion, and a portrait of King George I, to remind the yokels of “their duties to the king.” The books were kept for the library, the cloth was sold for about £560, a heap of money for the day, [FN: by comparison, Yale’s starting annual salary with the EIC in India was £10] though considering Yale’s net worth, really a drop in the bucket. There’s some suspicion that Yale made his contribution with an ulterior motive: to turn the college away from Puritanism to the Church of England. Some of the tutors actually did make the switch, and they were quickly dismissed.
And so the Collegiate School of Connecticut, a clunky-sounding name anyway, became Yale College, its first building financed in large part with money donated by an American-born Englishman who made his fortune, perhaps dishonestly, in India. Fittingly, 125 years after Yale’s gift, the university appointed Boston-born and Yale-educated Edward Salisbury to this country’s first Sanskrit professorship. Salisbury, who was later in his career credited with being the “Father of Oriental Studies” in this country, played a leading role in the early years of the American Oriental Society (founded in 1843), and twice served as its president (from 1863-66 and from 1873-81).
You might think that, in 1720, one brush with India, however tenuous, would be all that one person could expect in a lifetime, but Mather wasn’t your average person. Along with hundreds of books and pamphlets, he penned an estimated 8,000 letters. One of his correspondents was August Francke, a well-known German theologian and professor of Oriental languages. Francke and Mather were both ardent supporters of the Protestant missionary movement, which was just getting off the ground at the start of the eighteenth century, lagging behind the Catholics by a few hundred years. Mather was especially anxious to transform as many infidels as possible into devout Christians, since he believed the Second Coming was right around the corner. Francke put him in contact with one of an Indian missionaries, a German Pietist with the tongue-twisting name of Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg.
Ziegenbalg’s story begins in 1706, when the Protestant King of Denmark, Frederick IV, decided to challenge the Catholic missionaries in India. Failing to convince any Danish Protestants to take up the cause, Frederick contacted Francke, who that same year dispatched Ziegenbalg and another German, Heinrich Pluetshau, to the Danish colony in south India.
Even though they were sponsored by the Danish king, the two Germans immediately found themselves persona non grata when they arrived in India. The Danish East India Company’s officials, whose job it was to make money, feared their proselytizing would touch off a Hindu rebellion that would be bad for business. Moreover the colony’s Protestant chaplains (who ministered to Europeans only) took issue with the pair’s unorthodox Pietist religious beliefs.
The good news, relatively speaking, is that Ziegenbalg became popular with many of the Indian locals, since he made the effort to learn their language, Tamil, and understand their culture and religion, though during one country outing, the two Germans unceremoniously destroyed some idols at a roadside temple. He also was something of a social activist and supported the locals in their dealings with the autocratic Danish governor ... which on one occasion cost Ziegenbalg a four-month time-out. Irritated by his defense of a wronged widow, the governor decided to teach Mr Z a lesson he’d never forget and tossed him in the slammer to cool his heels.
Ziegenbalg though was serious about what he called his “business in souls.” When he was released in March 1709, he went right back to his old tricks. By 1711 he had translated the New Testament into Tamil, the first time this book had been translated into any Indian language, and making it the largest prose text at that time in that language. Then four years later, after setting up the first printing press in India, he whipped up a printed version. And so in 1721 (the same year Yale died), a copy of the Tamil New Testament found its way to Boston and the hands of Cotton Mather, one of the first books (if not the first) published in India to reach this country. [jackson]
I wasn’t able to discover what in the world Mather did with a Tamil New Testament, though it must have made an interesting conversation piece.
In that same year Mather published an expanded version of two of his letters to Ziegenbalg under the title India Christiana, a kind of “Christian Conversion for Dummies” of the time. Its sub-title reads:
A Discourse, Delivered unto the Commissioners, for the Propagation of the Gospel among the American Indians, which is Accompanied with several Instruments relating to the Glorious Design of Propagating our Holy Religion, in the Eastern as well as the Western, Indies. An Entertainment which they that are Waiting for the Kingdom of God will receive as Good News from a far Country.
Exactly when did Americans first come in contact with India? That depends on how we define “American” and “contact.” Technically anyone (of European ancestry) born in the American colonies prior to the Treaty of Paris (1784) was first and foremost a British subject, and only secondarily an American. But for the sake of this story let’s just say they were Americans in their heart of hearts; after all, they eventually did stir up all that trouble, just like good Americans are expected to when confronted with an unpopular government, in the 1770s. And let’s further agree that “contact” can either mean going to India in person, or having a little piece of India delivered to your doorstep.
With these comfortably loose-fitting definitions of “American” and “contact,” we can then find an interesting pair of Indian encounters way back around 1720. Both involved a man by the name of Cotton Mather. Mather is remembered nowadays, if at all, as someone somehow mixed up with the infamous Salem witch trials. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries however, he was an well-known and influential Puritan minister and author, not only in the colonial boondocks but in England as well. While many of us don’t have the time or energy to write out our shopping list, Mather in his life authored over 450 books and pamphlets on subjects ranging from witchcraft to theology, from history to astronomy and biology.
Enrolled in Harvard (where his father Increase served two terms as president) at age 12, already conversant in Latin and Greek, Mather graduated at 15, earned his MA at 18, an age when most of us are still struggling to get out of high school. A deeply religious yet tortured soul, given to long self-mortifying fasts and vigils, he was ordained at 21 and ministered at Boston’s Old North Church for 44 years, until his death in 1728. Some historians have downplayed or even ignored Mather’s role in the witch trials of the 1690s, which resulted in 19 hangings, one gruesome rock-crushing, and hundreds of ruined lives. But the fact is he fanned the hysteria’s flames, writing (in The Wonders of the Invisible World) that the “witches” were agents of a devilish conspiracy to “Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country.” After all the damage was done and the madness ended, it seems that Mather had second thoughts, but it was too late to save either the broken lives or his own reputation. More than 200 years after his death, in the 1970s, he was resurrected as the menacing “Hatemonger” in several issues of a popular comic book, his weapon a flame-throwing wooden cross.
One of Mather’s pet projects was a struggling college, the Collegiate School of Connecticut, located at Saybrook. He and nine other Puritan ministers, all Harvard grads, established the school in 1701 as a conservative alternative to their increasingly liberal-minded alma mater. There’s also a suggestion that the CSC was Mather’s way of thumbing his nose at Harvard, miffed because he was passed over for its presidency. But the 10 directors weren’t satisfied with the Saybrook campus and decided to move the school to New Haven, after the town, in a bidding war with Hartford, agreed to chip in £2,000 for moving expenses.
Even with that seed money the CSC remained impoverished–its students were boarded with their professors–and needed funds for a new New Haven building. So the Puritans cast about for a benefactor and finally targeted a wealthy Englishman by the name of Elihu Yale.
According to our criterion, Yale was just barely an American. He was born in Boston in 1649 though his family moved to England three years later and he never set foot in this country again. He went out to India in 1672 as a lowly “writer” or clerk for the East India Company. (See Sidelight) Through diligence and hard work, and a very advantageous marriage to a wealthy widow, by 1687 Yale had risen to the office of Governor of Madras. During his years in India he accumulated a sizeable fortune of his own, not a bad thing in itself, but there were and still are lingering questions about how he managed it. Sympathizers credit him with being (like his father) a shrewd businessman who made money trading in diamonds and spices. But there were charges, which historians have never been able to prove conclusively, that he also stuck his hand in the Company cookie jar and that some of his gains were ill-gotten. So depending on who you believe, either he had enemies on the governing Council who undermined his position with Company directors, or those directors wearied of his of his shady wheelings and dealings. Whatever the truth, Yale was kicked out of office in 1692.
Apparently he didn’t think he did anything wrong. In an attempt to get his job back, he dispatched his younger brother Thomas to London to plead his case to the British government’s powerful Privy Council. But Thomas died in 1697 without success, and Yale decided enough was enough. So in 1699 he returned to England, hauling along (according to one report) five tons of spices, precious stones, leather goods, and oriental screens.
Retired in style to his family’s homeland in Wales, Yale set out to spend his money. He assembled the largest private art collection in the country, and handed out handouts left and right. Naturally this largesse attracted widespread attention, even in the distant colony which he briefly, a long time past, called home. In 1713 he was approached by a representative of a very small and hard-up college in Connecticut, Mather’s CSC, and was talked into donating about 30 books to its library.
Five years later, the Puritans were after something more substantial than 30 books when they hat-in-hand again to Yale. And who better than Mather to write the pitch?
The Colony of Connecticut [he wrote], having for some years had a College at Saybrook without a collegious way of living for it, have lately begun to erect a large edifice for it in the town of New Haven. The charge of that expensive building is not yet all paid, nor are there yet any funds of revenues for salaries to the Professors and instructors to the society.
Sir, though you have your felicities in your family, which I pray God continue and multiply, yet certainly, if what is ... forming at New Haven might wear the name of YALE COLLEGE, it would be better than a name of sons and daughters. And your munificense might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name, as would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid.
Mather was offering a tit for a tat: if Yale would donate funds to help complete the construction project, Mather might get the college named after him. As a kicker, Mather hinted that since Yale’s only legitimate son had died years before, the college then would perpetuate his “valuable name” not only better than children, but even “better than an Egyptian pyramid.”
The idea appealed to Yale, but as a rabid Anglican, he had reservations about propping up a bunch of Puritans. So instead of hard cash Yale donated several bales of textiles, just over 400 books, mostly on religion, and a portrait of King George I, to remind the yokels of “their duties to the king.” The books were kept for the library, the cloth was sold for about £560, a heap of money for the day, [FN: by comparison, Yale’s starting annual salary with the EIC in India was £10] though considering Yale’s net worth, really a drop in the bucket. There’s some suspicion that Yale made his contribution with an ulterior motive: to turn the college away from Puritanism to the Church of England. Some of the tutors actually did make the switch, and they were quickly dismissed.
And so the Collegiate School of Connecticut, a clunky-sounding name anyway, became Yale College, its first building financed in large part with money donated by an American-born Englishman who made his fortune, perhaps dishonestly, in India. Fittingly, 125 years after Yale’s gift, the university appointed Boston-born and Yale-educated Edward Salisbury to this country’s first Sanskrit professorship. Salisbury, who was later in his career credited with being the “Father of Oriental Studies” in this country, played a leading role in the early years of the American Oriental Society (founded in 1843), and twice served as its president (from 1863-66 and from 1873-81).
You might think that, in 1720, one brush with India, however tenuous, would be all that one person could expect in a lifetime, but Mather wasn’t your average person. Along with hundreds of books and pamphlets, he penned an estimated 8,000 letters. One of his correspondents was August Francke, a well-known German theologian and professor of Oriental languages. Francke and Mather were both ardent supporters of the Protestant missionary movement, which was just getting off the ground at the start of the eighteenth century, lagging behind the Catholics by a few hundred years. Mather was especially anxious to transform as many infidels as possible into devout Christians, since he believed the Second Coming was right around the corner. Francke put him in contact with one of an Indian missionaries, a German Pietist with the tongue-twisting name of Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg.
Ziegenbalg’s story begins in 1706, when the Protestant King of Denmark, Frederick IV, decided to challenge the Catholic missionaries in India. Failing to convince any Danish Protestants to take up the cause, Frederick contacted Francke, who that same year dispatched Ziegenbalg and another German, Heinrich Pluetshau, to the Danish colony in south India.
Even though they were sponsored by the Danish king, the two Germans immediately found themselves persona non grata when they arrived in India. The Danish East India Company’s officials, whose job it was to make money, feared their proselytizing would touch off a Hindu rebellion that would be bad for business. Moreover the colony’s Protestant chaplains (who ministered to Europeans only) took issue with the pair’s unorthodox Pietist religious beliefs.
The good news, relatively speaking, is that Ziegenbalg became popular with many of the Indian locals, since he made the effort to learn their language, Tamil, and understand their culture and religion, though during one country outing, the two Germans unceremoniously destroyed some idols at a roadside temple. He also was something of a social activist and supported the locals in their dealings with the autocratic Danish governor ... which on one occasion cost Ziegenbalg a four-month time-out. Irritated by his defense of a wronged widow, the governor decided to teach Mr Z a lesson he’d never forget and tossed him in the slammer to cool his heels.
Ziegenbalg though was serious about what he called his “business in souls.” When he was released in March 1709, he went right back to his old tricks. By 1711 he had translated the New Testament into Tamil, the first time this book had been translated into any Indian language, and making it the largest prose text at that time in that language. Then four years later, after setting up the first printing press in India, he whipped up a printed version. And so in 1721 (the same year Yale died), a copy of the Tamil New Testament found its way to Boston and the hands of Cotton Mather, one of the first books (if not the first) published in India to reach this country. [jackson]
I wasn’t able to discover what in the world Mather did with a Tamil New Testament, though it must have made an interesting conversation piece.
In that same year Mather published an expanded version of two of his letters to Ziegenbalg under the title India Christiana, a kind of “Christian Conversion for Dummies” of the time. Its sub-title reads:
A Discourse, Delivered unto the Commissioners, for the Propagation of the Gospel among the American Indians, which is Accompanied with several Instruments relating to the Glorious Design of Propagating our Holy Religion, in the Eastern as well as the Western, Indies. An Entertainment which they that are Waiting for the Kingdom of God will receive as Good News from a far Country.
