Thomas Hodson was a Wesleyan Missionary, who served in India, in the Wesleyan Canarese Mission, at the Bangalore Petah and Gubbi. He helped in running the first Wesleyan Mission Canarese school in the erstwhile Mysore State. Hodson was a linguist and a Kannada scholar, and was also fluent in Tamil and Bengali. He helped in establishing the Wesleyan Canarese Chapel (now the Hudson Memorial Church) at Nagarthpete in the Bangalore Petah. In 1864, Hodson wrote An Elementary Grammar of the Kannada, or Canarese Language, a treatise on the grammar of the Kannada language.