CHENNAI: Conversion of the house of Bishop Robert Caldwell at Idayankudi in Tirunelveli district into a memorial will be the second honour bestowed on the scholar, who came to India as a Protestant missionary, by the Tamil Nadu government.
The house was originally a small shack measuring just 17X11 feet when Caldwell occupied it in 1841 after walking down to Idayankudi from Chennai, covering about 800 km. He started the journey in July 1941 and reached the poverty-stricken backward village towards the end of that year, says H Vincent Kumaradoss, who has written a biography of the Christian missionary from United Kingdom.
After reaching Madras in 1838 as a 24 year-old evangelist, Caldwell spend three years before setting out on the odyssey down south and choosing Idayankudi for his missionary work.
It was at that point that he lived in the small house, even as he was struggling to build the Holy Trinity Church in Idayankudi. It took Caldwell 33 years to build the church, which was consecrated in 1880.
Besides pre a ch i n g , Caldwell, who had graduated from the University of Glasgow, spend enormous time on linguistic research. In 1849 he published an ethnographic treatise on Shanars, the local community of people, and then in 1856 came out with a book on Dravidian grammar.
Besides coining the term ‘Dravidian’, he was the one who first who pointed out that the south Indian languages - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - had their origins outside the Indo-Aryan family and that they were distinctly different from Sanskrit.
Honouring the seminal work on Dravidian grammar, the DMK government headed by C N Annadurai installed a statue of Caldwell on the Marina during the second World Tamil Conference that was held in Madras in 1968.
The statue still stand hidden from public glare in a corner.
The shack became a proper house much later when the Idayankudi church congregation felt the need for a bigger accommodation for their pastor.
Caldwell vacated it only in 1882 to move into a Bishop bungalow in Thoothukudi.
The shack, whose both walls you could touch by stretching both hands, was subsequently converted into a parish hall, says Kumaradoss, whose book, Robert Caldwell - A Scholar- Missionary in Colonial South India, is perhaps the only biography of the man who devoted his entire life for the uplift of the backward region in Tamil Nadu, besides setting the tone for the later day Dravidian movement.
Caldwell died in 1891 and his body was interred beneath the chancelled floor of the Holy Trinity Church.