Denmark on the Coromandel

Four hundred years ago, Danish ships sailed into a place called Tharangambadi on the present-day Tamil Nadu coast. In this quiet fishing village on the Coromandel, the Danes imagined a great centre of trade and commerce.

After some paperwork with the reigning Tanjore Raja of the time, Raghunatha Nayak, the Danes claimed the town for themselves — for a fee of course. An annual amount of Rs 3,111. The year was 1620. Tharangambadi was now a flourishing station of the Danish East India Company, a lucrative centre of pepper trade.

‘Tharangambadi’ in Tamil translates to “the place of the singing waves”. If you say it right, the name rolls off the tongue in the most lilting manner, not unlike the waves that rumble up to the shore where the Danes set foot. But they couldn’t get behind this mouthful of a name, and so they promptly renamed Tharangambadi to Tranquebar, the anglicised version by which this Tamil seaside town is also commonly known today.

I arrive at Tranquebar quite by chance, at the end of a rather aimless coastal drive that began in Chennai early that morning. We drove through that seaside town colonised by the French that everyone knows (Puducherry), and three hours later, ended up at the seaside town colonised by the Danes that seemingly much fewer people know of. While Puducherry’s cafes were bursting with out-of-town holidaymakers that weekend morning, Tranquebar’s lone coffee shop was occupied only by our party.

Today, this former Danish outpost exists in a curious cross-cultural limbo. To enter Tranquebar, you drive through a distinctly European-style Town Gate or Landporten, bearing the Danish insignia and the year of its construction, 1792. Bucolic Tamil Nadu seems to fall away as soon as we pass through the gate. Streets are arranged in a neat grid pattern. Old maps label the roads as King’s Street and Goldsmith’s Street, but updated signboards bear the dual names of Queens Street/Rani Street.

(Clockwise from Left: Colonnaded stucco mansions with archways and shuttered windows are a common sight; A monument to Revs. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, the first Protestant missionaries to India; Fort Dansborg on the beach is the second largest Danish fort after Kronborg in Denmark —Photos: Malavika Bhattacharya)

Colonnaded stucco mansions with archways and shuttered windows stand in a line along a sandy stretch. Some lie unoccupied and falling into disrepair, like the Governor’s Bungalow dating back to the 1700s, still imposing, but in a wistful, forgotten sort of way. One heritage building, in particular, has been smartened up. The former summer residence of the British Collector is now the chic Neemrana Hotels’ Bungalow on the Beach. Ancient bungalows and churches hark back to the days when European governors were stationed here and brought with them the first wave of Protestantism.

Two churches along King’s Street make for an interesting history lesson. The small Zion Church dates back to 1701 and is one of India’s oldest Protestant Churches, built by the Danes. Opposite it, the New Jerusalem Church was set up by Protestant missionaries in 1718. At the entrance of the whitewashed building, a board declares that it is “The First Protestant Church in Asia for Tamil”.

At the end of this street, I come face to face with a glittering gold likeness of a man in a flowing coat and equally flowing curly locks. Rev. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was a German missionary who arrived in Tranquebar in 1706, at the order of the Danish king. Clearly an important figure in the town’s history, his statue is flanked by an extremely long signboard that pays obeisance to his inordinately long list of achievements.

Ziegenbalg was one of those who was first at everything: the first Protestant missionary to India, the first to start a paper mill in India, the first to introduce the printing press in India, the first to recommend Tamil be taught in Germany, and a long list of 20 other Firsts. A real overachiever by all counts.

Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, who arrived with him, were the first Protestant missionaries to India. Ziegenbalg is buried at the New Jerusalem Church, which he built for the local population. A forlorn sort of monument to the two stands close to the shore – a weathered stone topped by a cross, facing the ocean on which they arrived.

The Danish Commander’s House is an airy 18th-century bungalow, which was restored by the Danish Tranquebar Association. It now houses the Tranquebar Maritime Museum, where displays tell the stories of the sea. An old wooden ship occupies pride of place, surrounded by an odd collection of ships parts, old trunks, and the skeletal remains of marine creatures, and bits and bobs collected from Danish ships.

The 2004 tsunami ravaged the town of Tranquebar, with huge loss of life and property. The museum recounts the stories of fisherfolk who bore the brunt of this terrifying time.

Further down at the beach, local families and holidaymakers squeal excitedly as huge waves drench them to the bone. I join them in walking along the crumbling remnants of a brick wall, which juts into the ocean. Just beyond where the waves break on the shore, a salmon-coloured fort looms over the coastline. This is Fort Dansborg or the Danish Fort, the second largest Danish fort after Kronborg in Denmark.

In its heyday, the fort housed Danish officials, prisoners, plus food and wine. A walk along the cannon-lined ramparts leads to a museum documenting the history of the Danish association with Tranquebar, along with a curious collection of objects that could not be placed elsewhere, I imagine.

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The museum is dark and full of relics – broken bits of china, ancient weaponry and old maps, shell crafts and earthen figurines, fossils and skeletons, along with odds and ends that have washed ashore. If you peer at the grainy old documents displayed behind murky glass, you’ll read reams about Danish arrivals and trade and colonisation around Ceylon – present-day Sri Lanka — and India. It is a history buff’s playground. There are crumbling copies of treaties between the Danes and Indian Kings, along with the sale deed between the Danish and the British.

“For 200 years, Tranquebar was the base of the monarchy’s trade with East India,” reads a yellowing paper. Until 1845, the Danes remained in Tranquebar trading in spices like pepper, after which they sold it to the British for Rs 12.5 lakh. Assuming the Danes continued to pay the same rent for two centuries, some quick math reveals that they made a 100% profit of more than six lakh rupees for the sale of this seaside town. Truly a princely sum in those times.

An easy detour from Puducherry, this forgotten slice of Denmark in India’s deep south offers plenty of scope to wander and wonder without an agenda. On the map, Tranquebar looks much smaller than a Mumbai suburb, but the wealth of colonial heritage crammed into this tiny swatch by the sea is astounding. A quick visit here was the history lesson I never knew I needed.