Caldwell’s Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian!

Robert Caldwell (1814 – 1891) was a missionary for London Missionary Society. He arrived in India at age 24, studied the local language to spread the word of 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.

Tamizh and Dravidian Linguistics!

Caldwell first coined the term ‘Dravidian’ and paved the way for assertion of the superiority and richness of Tamil, independent of Sanskrit, which inspired the Pure-Tamil Movement in the early decades of the 1900s.

Some of my notes from the book:

• Tamil is the oldest and most highly cultivated member of the family, and that which contains the largest proportion of the family inheritance of forms and roots…

• Tamil imparted… more light than it received.

• The Dravidian family of languages…as the best surviving representative of a period in the history of human speech older than the Indo-European stage, older than the Scythian, and older than the separation of the one from the other?

• … a result of priceless value – would be the development of a good, readable, respectable, useful, Dravidian literature a literature written in a style free at once from pedantry and from vulgarisms, and in matter, tone, and tendency, as well as in style, worthy of so intelligent a people as the natives of Southern India undoubtedly are.

• …in the Presidency of Madras and the principal towns it has already won its way to the position which was formerly occupied by Sanskrit as the vehicle of higher learning. Neither English, however, nor any other foreign tongue appears to have the slightest chance of becoming the vernacular speech of any portion of the inhabitants of Southern India. Indigenous Dravidian languages, which have maintained their ground for more than two thousand years against Sanskrit, the language of a numerous, powerful, and venerated sacerdotal race, may be expected successfully to resist the encroachments of every other tongue.

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DID YOU KNOW:

வ. உ. சி (V.O.C.) studied at Caldwell High School at Thoothukudi/தூத்துக்குடி (also known as Tuticorin or ‘திருமந்திர நகர்’ or ‘முத்துநகர்’)

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Most illegible, isn’t it?

Every enthusiast should read the book to know how well researched and profound Caldwell’s scholarly work is…