Ernest Trumpp


Ernest Trumpp was a German professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Munich and a philologist. He first came to India in the 1850s and published scholarly work on the Sindhi and other western subcontinental languages. Thereafter, he was sought and sent to and the Punjab region to study and translate the Sikh scriptures by Christian missionaries aiming 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 notable and controversial works was based on an 8-year study of the Sikh scriptures, where he philologically analyzed and translated a significant portion of the Guru Granth Sahib into English in the 1870s. Many in the Sikh community regarded his introductory remarks to his translation as "extremely offensive". According to the Indologist Mark Juergensmeyer, 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 with Sikhs at the Golden Temple remain valuable reference works for contemporary scholars.

Biography

Trumpp was born on 13 March 1828 at Ilsfeld in Wurtemberg Province in Germany. He became the Regius Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Munich and member of Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
Around 1854 he arrived in India as a missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society to study the languages of India and to prepare grammars and glossaries for use by Christian missionaries. There he was initially stationed at the Karachi mission, where he learnt the Sindhi language. Later, he was stationed at Peshawar, where he studied the Pashto language. 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 in Lahore. 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 Common Prayer Book into the Persian language in 1858. In 1866 he edited and published Shah Jo Risalo, 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, and translated most of the sacred books of the Sikh Adi Granth in 1870.
After he returned to Württemberg in 1876, he dedicated most of his energies to translation. By 1876 he translated the Japji Sahib, So Purkh, Sohila, So Darh, Majh, the Ragas, sloks of Kabir, Shaikh Farid, and Guru Tegh Bahadur, and Savaiyyas of the Bhatts.

Sikh scriptures

, a British colonial administrator and linguist, suggested Court of Directors of the British East India Company on 12 August 1857 that India office in London should make arrangements for translation of Adi Granth 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 Punjab to translate the Sikh scriptures into English.
Trumpp enthusiastically started studying and translating them in 1870. However, after his initial effort, he stated that they 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. 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 arrogance of scientific-analytical method. 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 with Sikhs at the Golden Temple remain valuable reference works for contemporary scholars.

Other Sikh texts

In the course of his research, it seems he had discovered the first known manuscript of the Puratan Janamsakhis, the earliest known biography of Guru Nanak, 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 lives of the later gurus, 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