Ferdinand Kittel

The Story

Born in 1832 near Hamburg in what is now Germany, Kittel sailed to Bhārat under the Basel Mission and was posted in coastal and interior Karnataka — Mangalore, Bhadravati and beyond. Where many missionaries learned the language to preach at people, Kittel learned it to read with them, and he quickly became one of the finest Kannada scholars of his age.

His masterwork was the Kannada-English dictionary, a monumental word-list built from literature, speech and the countryside's dialects. He also wrote a Kannada grammar, translated the Bible into Kannada, and composed verse in the language — work that gave nineteenth-century Kannada the reference tools that modern languages take for granted.

Kittel moved among printers, pastors, pandits and administrators, and his bilingual labours helped standardise written Kannada at a time when the language was being pressed from all sides by English and by Mysore's own literary politics.

He died in 1903, and Karnataka has never forgotten him: his name is on institutions, and his dictionary is still consulted. He belongs to the long line of outsiders — from Al-Biruni to Kittel — who served a language more faithfully than many of its own speakers.