Around 200 years ago, when a 25-year-old man started a voyage from England to Southern parts of India on a mission to spread Christianity, no one thought he would set off a revolution in a language called Malayalam.
Benjamin Bailey, who reached here as a missionary of Church Mission Society (CMS), on September 9, 1816, later, became a revered icon in the cultural history of Kerala.
Interestingly, as the bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of CSI missionaries is being planned, Malayalam language, which is indebted to Bailey for the current typography and the first lexicon, achieved a major milestone when the Central government declared it a Classical Language.
Bailey played a major role in developing printing and book publishing in Malayalam, which has now grown into a gargantuan industry with more than `1 billion turn over every year. Bailey, who reached Kottayam via Alappuzha port, established the first printing press in Kottayam in 1821 named as CMS press and started printing in Malayalam. He was the first lexicographer in the language, and brought out ‘A Dictionary of High and Colloquial Malayalam and English’.
He is also credited as an author and a translator.
“One of his major contributions was changing the shape of Malayalam types from square to round form, which is the current format Malayalam letters. We can call him as an architect of Malayalam typography. It was a major development in the history of our language, as the Malayalam letters achieved a unique format from its parent languages Tamil and Sanskrit. He was instrumental in reducing the length of sentences in Malayalam prose,” said Prof Samuel Nellimugal, former head of Malayalam department, CMS College, Kottayam.