Dr Ernest Trumpp

Dr Ernest Trumpp (1828 to 1885) was a German linguist whose 1877 English translation of the Adi Granth, commissioned by the British India Office, is remembered by Sikhs as an insult to the Guru Granth Sahib. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him a capable scholar whose Christian outlook left him without empathy for Sikhism.

He was born at Ilsfeld in Württemberg, and Wikipedia gives the date as 13 March 1828. After political unrest in Germany he went to London in 1849 and worked at East India House. Sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society, he came to India about 1854 to study Indian languages for Christian missionaries, learned Sindhi and published a Sindhi grammar, worked on Pashto, and returned to Germany in 1860.

Key moments

• 1869: the India Office commissioned him to translate the Guru Granth Sahib into English.
• 1870 to 1872: he worked in Lahore, consulted granthis and built his own grammar and dictionary. In 1872 the India Office Library sent him manuscripts including the Puratan Janam Sakhi, which the Encyclopaedia calls the earliest known biography of Guru Nanak. He returned to Germany that year and finished the translation while teaching.
• 23 January 1877: the preface to The Adi Granth, or the Holy Scriptures of the Sikhs is dated at Munich. The work was incomplete; Wikipedia, citing Frederic Pincott, says it covered 5,719 of about 15,575 stanzas.
• In his introduction he called the scripture "incoherent and shallow in the extreme" and Sikhism "a waning religion, that will soon belong to history". The Encyclopaedia adds that he treated Sikhism as part of the Hindu complex and rendered Ik Oankar simply as "om", ignoring the numeral one and the suffix kar.
• Reaction: the Encyclopaedia says the Sikhs did not approve of the work, and quotes Max Arthur Macauliffe saying that it gave mortal offence to the Sikhs. Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion followed, and he wrote that one aim of it was to make some reparation to the Sikhs for Trumpp's insults.

What he is remembered for. As the scholar whose translation insulted the Guru Granth Sahib. Scholars are divided on the rest. J. S. Grewal judged him prejudiced and a mistranslator of Sikh words, metaphors and phrases; Mark Juergensmeyer says his linguistic work and field notes are still used, with caution (both cited by Wikipedia). The Encyclopaedia notes that his work also prompted exploration of Sikh matters by Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike.