A Scholar's Word Taken Up as a Banner

Robert Caldwell, a missionary and philologist working in south India, published his comparative grammar in 1856 and established that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and their relatives form a family unrelated to Sanskrit. He needed a name for it and took Dravida, a Sanskrit term for the southern country. The demonstration was sound and the word stuck. What Caldwell cannot have foreseen is what happened to it next. In the twentieth century the label was picked up in Tamil Nadu by a political movement that used it against Brahminical and northern claims to precedence, and the Dravidian parties that came out of that movement have governed the state for most of the period since 1967. So the word now does two jobs. It names a language family whose membership is a technical question, and it names a modern political identity with its own history, its own arguments and its own opponents.

A reader meeting it has to work out which is meant, and the two are not always separable, since the political use rests on the linguistic claim being true. Caldwell's own position complicates the story further. He was a missionary, and part of his motive in separating the southern languages from Sanskrit was to argue that southern peoples owed nothing to Brahminical culture, an argument later used by people who had no interest at all in his church.