Bishop Robert
Caldwell (7 May 1814 – 28 August 1891) was an Evangelist, missionary and linguist, who
academically established the Dravidian family of languages. Robert Caldwell was born at Clady, then in County Antrim, Ireland, on 7 May
1814 to poor Scottish
Presbyterian
parents. At 24, Caldwell arrived in Madras on 8 January 1838 as a missionary of
the London Missionary Society and later joined the Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel Mission (SPG). He served as Assistant Bishop of Tirunelveli
from 1877. In 1844, Caldwell married Eliza Mault (1822–99); the couple was to
have seven children together. She was the younger daughter of the veteran Travancore
missionary, Reverend Charles Mault (1791–1858) of the London Missionary Society.
For more than forty years, Eliza worked in Nagercoil and
Tirunelveli proselytising the vulnerable, especially Tamil-speaking women. While
serving as Bishop of Tirunelveli (alongside Edward Sargent), Caldwell did much
original research on the history of Tirunelveli. He studied palm leaf
manuscripts and Sangam literature
in his search, and made several excavations, finding the foundations of ancient
buildings, sepulchral urns and coins with the fish emblem of the Pandyan
Kingdom.This
work resulted in his book A Political and General History of the District of
Tinnevely (1881), published by the Government of the Madras Presidency.
As the missionary zeal of the
Europeans made them unmindful of the harsh climatic conditions in India, it seemed
Caldwell had special reasons to select Idayankudi. He first coined the term
‘Dravidian’ and his groundbreaking work, A Comparative Grammar of the
Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, paved the way for assertion
of the superiority and richness of Tamil, independent of Sanskrit, which
inspired the Non-Brahmin Movement in the early decades of the 1900s.
As a missionary, Caldwell’s
primary objective was conversion. But in the process, the changes he brought in
the lives of the people he worked with were expressed in his lecture.
The Government of TamilNadu has created a memorial in his honour and a postage stamp has been issued in his name. On the Madras Marina, a statue of Caldwell was erected as a gift of the Church of South India in 1967.
It is good to hear that the bicentenary of this great man is to be celebrated by the government of TamilNadu. The Tamil Nadu government’s plan to celebrate the completion of the bicentenary of Bishop Robert Caldwell on May 7 includes garlanding his statue at Idaiyankudi, the village from which he did his missionary work and where he was laid to rest. His statue on the Marina will also be garlanded by State Ministers.Some pictures from Idaiyangudi
