Ernest Trumpp (13 March 1828 – 5 April 1885) was a Christian missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society. He was also German professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Munich and a philologist. With an intent to convert the populace of western un-divided India to Christianity, he was seconded and sent to the Sindh and Punjab region (British India). He first came to India in the 1850s and published scholarly work on the Sindhi and other western subcontinental languages. He also worked to translate the Sikh scriptures to help Christian missionaries 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 controversial works was based on an 8-year study of the Sikh scriptures, where he attempted to philologically analyze and translate a significant portion of the Guru Granth Sahib into English in the 1870s. Trumpp was limited in his knowledge of sub-continent languages to a few that he had studied, while the Granth Sahib was composed using multiple languages of the South Asia region. Hence, numerous discrepancies appear in his partial translations, which were rejected by the mainstream Sikhs. Many observers of the faith (Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims) regarded his introductory remarks to his translation as "extremely offensive". According to the Indologist Mark Juergensmeyer, criticism of Trumpp's translation was also, in part, due to discussions only with Nirmala Sikhs and not with mainstream Sikh scholars. However, 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 have been used by contemporary scholars with caution.
Biography
Trumpp was born on 13 March 1828 at Ilsfeld in Wurtemberg Province (now Baden-Württemberg) 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 (Punjab). 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 Book of Common Prayer 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.
After he returned to Württemberg in 1876, he dedicated most of his energies to translation.
Sikh scriptures
Robert Needham Cust, 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.