Making it in Tranquebar: Science, Medicine and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Danish-Halle Mission, c. 1732-44

From their arrival in the Danish-Norwegian colony of Tranquebar in south India at the beginning of the eighteenth century the missionaries of the protestant Danish-Halle mission were engaging with many different kinds of knowledge present in local Tamil society and environment. This paper will focus on the activities in the field of natural history or science, especially medicine and botany, from the time of the arrival of the Mission Doctor Samuel Benjamin Cnoll in 1732 until about 1744. The establishment and formation around this time of the office of the European mission doctor appears to have been an important moment in the development of the connection between the Mission and scientific enquiry, which is better known from the second half of the century. As a case study, it presents a window into the complex connections between medicine, science, religion and economy in the early eighteenth century, both locally in colonial south India and in global networks. The case will show how the Mission in Tranquebar was a node in the circulation of knowledge in such a global network. As part of the circulation process, new scientific knowledge about the colonial ‘periphery’ of India was constructed in a contingent local fusion of knowledge negotiated with Tamil ‘experts’ and the concerns of the scientific ‘centres’ of Europe.