Beyond Tranquebar Grappling Across Cultural Borders in South India

Esther Fihl and  AR Venkatachalapathy

Orient BlackSwan

644 pages, Rs945

Tranquebar, also known as Tharangampadi, is a coastal town in Tamil Nadu that was once a colony of the Danish empire. It is also the place that first introduced the modern printing press and Protestant Christianity to the subcontinent. More recently, Tranquebar has become a tourist centre, and was devastated by the tsunami of 2004. This collection of twenty-four essays explores the town from the perspectives of social anthropology, art history, sociology of religion, ethnography and history. The essays collectively examine Tranquebar as a unique crossroads of south India, instead of seeing it as an appendix to the history of Denmark or German Christian missionary activity.