(Tranquebar beach views)
Soren looked up. He was staring at me with his steely eyes. Took his coffee mug and gulped down the remaining coffee and then turned his eyes towards sea beyond the beach. We were sitting on the veranda of the hotel “The Bungalow On The Beach” at
Tranquebar or
Tharangambadi in Tamil which means
“The land of the singing waves”I made my decision to visit
Tranquebar, a sleepy small beach town further down in south east to
Pondicherry in the state of Tamil Nadu based on a casual comment of a friend of mine. I had gone to Pondicherry or now named as
Puducherry, for a conference.
I went to
Tranquebar by road, taking NH45A and covered 120 kms in about 3 hours.
Main street of Tranquebar
As we passed the sleepy town to my hotel on the beach, I was stunned! Yes, just stunned! I saw a very interesting and appealing setting. Streets lined with colorfully painted homes, European architecture churches, a mosque, some empty houses (the town was devastated by 2004 Tsunami,as I came to know later), sprouting bougainvillea gardens and..Wow, the white sand beach and aquamarine waters of Indian ocean, touching our hotel!
I loved it being from an urban jungle-called Mumbai. It was a place of soulful refuge, of unhurried pleasures and a mystic silence all around.
Tranquebar was a forgotten beautiful Danish beach town buried into the pages of history.
Fort Dansburg
In the late afternoon, I visited the majestic
Fort Dansborg with Danish style, facing sea, the seat of Danish governor of Danish India. During its heyday, the Danish East India Company and Swedish East India Company imported more tea than the British East India Company and smuggled 90 percent of it into Britain, where it could be sold at a huge profit. Some of the walls of the fort were 3 meters thick!
(courtesy Team-BHP.com)
Later, I visited the
Masilamani Nathar Temple on the sea that survived the 2004 Tsunami. Though the back side of the temple was partly destroyed by the surge, the temple was still intact. Then I walked on the quite beach where I met Soren. He was a Dane, on a visit to
Tranquebar on behalf of a Copanhagen based NGO undertaking reconstruction work of
Tranquebar.
It was Soren who took me show the statue of
Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, the Bible translator in Tamil language and who established the first printing press in Asia and published studies of the Tamil language and of Indian religion and culture. His translation of the New Testament into Tamil in 1715, and the church building that he and his associates constructed in 1718, are still in use today.
View of my hotel "The Bungalow on The Beach" from the beach
Finally we walked back to our hotel
“The Bungalow on The Beach” and were sitting on the veranda when I had questioned him on the secret and the history of this former Danish lost town in India. I admitted to Soren, that though an Indian but sadly, I didn’t know much about it.
He looked back at me and said smilingly,
“Tranquebar has a very special place in our hearts. We had few colonies compared to what Britsh had and then it was the beginning of Denmark's East India Company.”Soren continued and I listened mystified. I’m giving below a summery of what he narrated.
“The Danish colonies in India were founded by the Danish East India Company, which was active from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The Danish colony's capital was Fort Dansborg at Tranquebar, established in 1620, on the Coromandel coast.
The Danish also established several commercial outposts, governed from Tranquebar:
•1696 - 1722 Oddeway Torre on the Malabar coast.
•1698 - 1714 Dannemarksnagore at Gondalpara, southeast of Chandernagore.
•1752 - 1791 Calicut.
•October 1755 Frederiksnagore at Serampore, in present-day West Bengal.
•1754/1756 the Nicobar Islands under the name Frederiksøerne.
•1763 Balasore (already occupied 1636-1643).
In 1777 it was turned over to the government by the chartered company and became a Danish crown colony.
In 1789 the Andaman Islands became a British possession. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British attacked Danish shipping, and devastated the Danish East India Company's India trade. In May 1801
- August 1802 and 1808 - 20 September 1815 the British even occupied Dansborg and Frederiksnagore.
The Danish colonies went into decline, and the British ultimately took possession of them, making them part of British India: Serampore was sold to the British in 1839, and Tranquebar and most minor settlements in 1845 (11 October 1845 Frederiksnagore sold; 7 November 1845 other continental Danish India settlements sold); on 16 October 1868 all Danish rights to the Nicobar Islands, which since 1848 had been gradually abandoned, were sold to Britain.”Getting there:
By air: Tranquebar is 280 km from Chennai airport.
By rail: It is 35 km from Nagapattinam and Chidambaram. By road: Chidambaram, 35 km; Poompuhar, 20 km; Pondicherry, 100 km
The Hotels in Tranquebar:
1/The Bunglow On The Beach
http://bungalow-on-the-beach.neemranahotels.com/2/Gate House
3/Nayak House
Research and References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_East_India_Companyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark%E2%80%93India_relationsFurther readings:
http://www.scholiast.org/history/tra-narr.html(from University of Copenhagen in spring 1996)