James Drummond Anderson (1852 – 24 November 1920) was a member of the Indian Civil Service from 1873 until 1900, and later a lecturer in Bengali at the University of Cambridge.
His father James Anderson was a doctor in the service of the East India Company and his mother was Ellen Mary Garstin.
Educated at Cheltenham and Rugby, he passed the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination in 1873, obtaining the highest marks among all the candidates for his English essay.
He was then transferred to Assam, where he was posted in districts, acted as the Inspector-General of Police, and an Assistant Secretary to the Chief Commissioner.
In an obituary in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Irish linguist and fellow member of the ICS Sir George Abraham Grierson notes J. D. Anderson's many achievements in the field of language studies.
He published A Short List of Words of the Hill Tippera Language (1885), which was "an excellent comparative vocabulary of that form of speech and of Lushei and Bodo.
He made many contributions to the Royal Asiatic Society's journal on "difficult points of Bengali grammar, idiom, and prosody."
In an article entitled “A New Bengali Writer” in the Times Literary Supplement dated 11 July 1918, he introduced Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay to a western readership.