A civil servant in the East India Company during the early colonisation of India by the British, Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819) became a well-known scholar in the Tamil and Sanskrit languages. This entry from volume 17 of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) appears in Wikisource.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ellis,_Francis_Whyte_%28DNB00%29