Joseph Tiefenthaler

Who was Joseph Tiefenthaler?

Joseph Tiefenthaler was a Jesuit missionary and one of the earliest European geographers to write about India.

Born in Bozen, in the county of Tyrol, then in the Austrian empire, not much is known of his early life and studies except that he spent two years in Spain. He entered the Society of Jesus on 9 October 1729, and went in 1740 to the East Indian mission. Arriving in Goa, he was soon sent to be the Rector of the Jesuit High School of Agra. Agra was then the center of the so-called 'Mission of the Grand Moghul'. In 1747 he went to Narwar where he stayed some 18 years.

To escape Prime Minister Pombal's order for all Jesuits to be expelled from Portuguese controlled areas, he left and travelled around North India, He followed the entire course of the Ganges down to Calcutta, which had been newly established as a city by Job Charnock as a commercial settlement of the English. On returning to Agra in 1778, he received the news that the Society of Jesus, the religious order to which he belonged, had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. He stayed in India, and on his death in Lucknow was buried in the mission cemetery in Agra. Besides his native tongue he understood Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hindustani, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit.