 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" (in this case "Aryan" as an ethnic signifier for foreign and "Brahmanical" to signify the "Hinduism" of the high-caste).These wildly speculative claims, well outside the scope of linguistics, were intended "to develop a history which asserted that the indigenous Dravidians had been subdued and colonized by the Brahmanical Aryans".However, the first edition of Caldwell's grammar was "met with firm resistance" by the Chanars precisely because they "did not like the idea of being divorced from Brahmanical civilization", the very division Caldwell was hoping to exploit.