Ferdinand Kittel

Who was Ferdinand Kittel?

Reverend Ferdinand Kittel was a priest and indologist with the Basel Mission in south India and worked in Mangalore, Madikeri and Dharwad in Karnataka. His father's name is Gottfried Christian Kittel and his mother's name is Helen Hubert. He is most famous for his studies of the Kannada language and for producing the first ever Kannada-English dictionary of about 70,000 words in 1894. He also composed numerous Kannada poems.

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", and 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. 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.