"Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, in their work on the creation of identities in Asia, explain Caldwell's importance as the founder of today's Dravidian identity: It was through his Comparative Grammar (1856) that he systematically laid the foundation of Dravidian ideology . . . It was not so much the philological findings in the work that had such a profound impact, as the way Caldwell interpreted and expressed them in the lengthy introduction and appendix. He not only managed to erect a racial, linguistic, and religio-cultural divide between the minority Brahmin and majority non-Brahmin (Dravidian) population of South India, but also provided a systematic project for reclaiming and recovering an ancient and 'pure' Dravidian language and culture."
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quoted in Brook, Timothy, and Andre Schmid. Nation Work: Asian Elites and NationalIdentities. University of Michigan Press, 2000. quoted from Malhotra, R., NÄ«lakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines
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Robert Caldwell
Robert Caldwell (7 May 1814 â 28 August 1891) was a missionary for London Missionary Society. He arrived in India at age 24, and studied the local language to spread the word of the Bible in a vernacular language, studies that led him to author a text on comparative grammar of the South Indian languages. In his book, Caldwell proposed that there are Dravidian words in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the archaic Greek language, and the places named by Ptolemy.
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