Robert Caldwell

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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 Dravidian language family, 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.