First, a caveat: Caldwell's understanding of Dravidian languages as belonging to the same family as Finno-Ugric and Turkic (his "Scythian") is not accepted by most researchers today. Also, personally, I can't stand the use of the term "race" in books from that period, rationalize it as you might.

However, his grammar is still valuable and reprinted in India. It also forms the basis for much of the later work.

I used it together with Burrow and Emeneau's dictionary (1984, available at this site) as a "soft" introduction to Dravidian languages, then I went over to Steever (1998) and Krishnamurti (2003, also available here). Then I concentrated on the Dravidian languages which were of interest to me.

BTW, has anyone else noticed the terrible absence of the Assimil tamoul sans peine? I have the book, but not the audio!

Dravidian