Discover

:''For the U.S. Congressman, see Robert Porter Caldwell.''
Bishop 'Robert Caldwell' (1814 -1891) was an orientalist who pioneered the study of the Dravidian languages with his influential work ''Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages'' (1856; revised edition 1875).
He was the first European to propose that the South Indian languages of Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada formed a separate language family, which he named the Dravidian languages, affirming their antiquity and literary history, and their independence from Sanskrit and the Indo-Aryan languages. He speculated that speakers of the proto-Dravidian language entered India from the northwest.
He served as the Bishop of Tirunelveli (along with Bishop Sargent) and did a lot of original research work on the history of Tirunelveli.