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His lack of comprehension led him to describe the scripture as "incoherent and shallow in the extreme, and couched at the same time in dark and perplexing language, in order to cover these defects.
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He considered most Sikhs had become more of a military brotherhood with a martial spirit, inspired by the Sikh sense of their history and identity. The Nirmala Sikh intelligentsia he met during his years of study, stated Trumpp, only had a "partial understanding" of their own scripture. Trumpp's lack of understanding of the multiple languages used in the Granth and the subtle changes in meaning led to his observation that that Sikhism was "a reform movement in spirit", but "completely failed to achieve anything of real religious significance", He concluding that the Sikhs he worked with did not understand the metaphysical speculations of their scripture. According to Tony Ballantyne, Ernest Trumpp's insensitive approach such as treating the Sikh scripture as a mere book and blowing cigar smoke over its pages while studying the text, did not endear him to the Sikh granthis who regarded it as an embodiment of the Gurus. However, Trumpp observed that the language of the Guru Granth Sahib is complex and hard to understand without an interpreter, especially in relation to important but complex ideas. He stated that "as a result of their warlike manner of life and the troubled times," that "Sikhs had lost all learning" and the granthis were misleading. He stated that the Sikh granthis who recited the text in the early 1870s lacked comprehension and its sense of meaning, largely because of the vedic interpretation they attempted. Trumpp made no real effort to have a dialogue with established Sikh scholars of time such as Kahan singh Nabha. The Nirmalas and Udasis had risen to prominence at the expense of the mainstream Khalsa in the eighteenth century, which had been experiencing increased Mughal persecution in the 1700s that forced it to cede control of Sikh shrines to sects without external identifying articles, and subsequently focused on political sovereignty. Nirmala Sikhs were Sanskrit scholars, which interpreted Sikh scripture from within a Brahminical framework. Though a linguist, his lack of comprehension of the multiple languages used to compose the Granth and his interaction, which was limited to granthis of the Nirmala sect, led to a flawed interpretation. He began studying and translating them, but opined that they were not worth translating in full, because "the same few ideas, were being endlessly repeated". In 1869, he was asked by the Secretary of state for India on behalf of the British government to translate the Adi Granth and Dasam Granth. The Sikh scripture Guru Granth Sahib in a GurdwaraĮrnest Trumpp, a colonial-era Christian missionary sponsored by the Ecclesiastical Mission Society, was sent to Sindh and later to Punjab, to study the languages of the sub-continent.