authors. These missionaries had been on the cast for quite some time and had learnt the language. The third group has about 119 books by Hindus on their religion and the last or fourth group contains 11 books by Muslim authors on their religion. The fact that his parcel contained books on Hinduism and Islam by their respective authors reveals that Ziegenbalg was not a narrow minded secluded individual. He was receptive to the wonders and truths of other religions too. It would have cost Ziegenbalg a fortune to purchase the third category of books and funds were something Ziegenbalg perpetually lacked. He soon discovered that needy Brahmin widows almost sold them for a song. He was thus able to buy them at a price he could afford. Ziegenbalg had three people to assist him to learn Tamil. One was Aleppa and then there was a native poet and finally a Malabar (Tamil) writer who was to write down all words and expression which Ziegenbalg had not met in other books. Despite the heavy schedule to master Tamil, he did not permit the mission work to suffer.

With the native writer nothing words and expressions began Ziegenbalg’s Malabar Dictionary. During a short period of two years, a collection of 20,000 words and expressions was made. There was one column in Tamil characters, another written in Roman type giving the pronunciation and the last column gave the meaning in German. To gather words for this dictionary, he read books on history, theology, philosophy, medicine and philology. Four years later, this Lexicon became a mammoth work comprising 40,000 words and expressions. It was arranged in the Tamil alphabetical order, till the second letter of the word. Ziegenbalg then worked on poetical dictionary of nearly 17,000 words for which he enlisted the help of experienced Tamil poets. Of the later dictionary, Ziegenbalg felt that it was not much of use to preach the Gospel but “it is a key to all poetical books”. He prepared a German index for it. The poetical language, the author declares is vastly different from the one used in common every day talk. This work however was an Ōlai.

Ziegenbalg had great plans. A church called “New Jerusalem” was built on the 4th of August, 1707. The Danish Ritual