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new colony until then had been severely restricted, but some
foreigners doing missionary work did succeed in reaching India and
whilst pursuing scientific or scholarly studies were also able to bring
printed works and manuscripts back to Europe with them. In this
manner numerous Tuebingen alumni, who during the 19th century
had become missionaries in Asiatic countires, contributed many
oriental manuscripts and printed books to our library.
In 1837 the library received its first collection of Indian
manuscripts and printed literature from a missionary named John
Haeberlin (1808 – 1849), who had returned temporarily from Calcutta
for health reasons in that year. He donated mainly Sanskrit manuscripts
in Bengali script. In 1842 a large amount of printed matter in Sanskrit
and Persian was received from the Oriental Society in London.
Heinrich Ewald (1803 – 1875), a theologian, who came to
Tuebingen after he was forced to leave the University of Goettingen
for political reasons in the 1830's, is considered to have reactivated
oriental studies in Tuebingen. He prepared the first catalogue of
oriental manuscripts, which was published in 1839 and contained
in its Indian section mostly the manuscripts received from Haeberlin.
During the following decades various manuscripts and
printed books in Indian Dravidian languages were donated by
Hermann Gundert (1814 – 1893), Hermann Moegling (1811 – 1881)
and Karl Wilhelm Isenberg (1806 – 1864), Ernst Trumpp (1828 –
1885), a missionary in the region known today as Pakistan,
bequeathed important early printed literature on Sindhi to the
University Library.
During a vacation in 1846 in Germany Gundert, a missionary
of the Baseler Mission in Kerala, visited Tuebingen, where he had
originally studied theology, and donated several Malayalam
manuscripts and printed works. These Malayalam manuscripts on
paper and olas were indexed and listed in the second printed
manuscript catalogue published in 1865 by the then Librarian and
holder of the Chair of Sanskrit, Rudolf Roth. More Malayalam
manuscripts were presented to the library by Gundert's heirs after
his death in 1893. During the nineteenth century our initial collection
was gradually supplemented by further Arabic and Sanskrit
manuscripts.
In 1854 Rudolf V. Roth (1821 – 1895) became the first full
