1. Robert Caldwell was a British missionary and linguist.
15 Facts About Robert Caldwell
1. 2.
Robert Caldwell married Eliza Mault, the daughter of another missionary Rev Charles Mault posted in India.
3.
Robert Caldwell served as assistant bishop of Tirunelveli from 1877.
4.
Robert Caldwell then returned to Glasgow, probably as a consequence of a crisis of faith, and he became active in the Congregational church.
5.
Robert Caldwell won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford only to find it rescinded when the authorities discovered that he had been born in Ireland.
6.
Robert Caldwell responded by joining the London Missionary Society, who sent him to the University of Glasgow for training.
7.
Robert Caldwell left university with a distinction and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister.
8.
At 24, Robert 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.
9.
In 1844, Robert Caldwell married Eliza Mault in CSI Home Church, Nagercoil, with whom he had seven children.
10.
Robert Caldwell identified south Indian Brahmins with Indo-Europeans, which was partly based on his belief that the Indo-Europeans had "higher mental gifts and higher capacity for civilisation".
11.
Robert Caldwell asserted that the low-caste Chanar were not merely Tamil speakers but an "indigenous Dravidian" people, distinct ethnically and, most critically for him, religiously, from their high-caste oppressors, whom he referred to as "Brahmanical Aryans".
12.
Robert Caldwell 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.
13.
Meanwhile, on difficult ground for evangelism, Robert Caldwell achieved Christian conversion among the lower castes.
14.
Robert Caldwell had adopted some of the methods of the Lutheran missionaries of earlier times, having learned German purely in order to study their practices.
15.
Robert Caldwell is still remembered there, and his statue, erected eighty years after his death, stands near the Marina Beach at Chennai.