Ferdinand Kittel

Ferdinand Kittel (7 April 1832 – 18 December 1903) was a Lutheran priest and indologist with the Basel Mission in south India and worked in Mangalore, Madikeri and Dharwad in Karnataka. He is most famous for his studies of the Kannada language and for producing a Kannada-English dictionary of about 70,000 words in 1894. He also composed numerous Kannada poems.

Early life Kittel was born 7 April 1832 in Resterhafe, East Frisia, off the northwestern coast of Germany. His father, Gottfried Christian Kittel, was a priest. His mother was Helen Hubert. Kittel was the eldest of five children. His education was praised by the headmaster as "Never Less Than Good." He joined the Basel Mission at the wish of his father.

In India Kittel learned Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and English. He arrived in India in 1853. As a missionary, he endeavoured to follow Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians and "become as an Indian unto the Indians".

Having a strong desire to learn Kannada, he undertook exhaustive studies learning the Kannada language, customs and local music. This earned rebuke from the Basel Mission, where he was already an outsider on account of his North German origin and academic education (the other missionaries were chiefly from southwest Germany and the lower/middle classes, though Gottfried Weigle had studied at Tübingen). This marginalised him by pushing him to a remote station in the Nilgiris and later confining him to the mission's press in Mangalore. He returned to Germany, but visited India again in his fifties to complete his dictionary, which by then had become for him an end in itself, and not merely an instrument secondary to missionary work. (Many Kannada-language dictionaries had existed at least since poet Ranna's 'Ranna Khanda' in the tenth century.) Kittel also composed numerous Kannada poems. He translated Nagavarma's work on Kannada prosody.

Contemporary recognition Kittel is today almost forgotten in Germany, but is still widely recognised in Karnataka.