Shapurji Edalji

Shapurji Edalji (1841/1842 – 23 May 1918) was an Indian-born convert to Anglicanism who was likely the first person from South Asia to be made the vicar of an English parish. His achievements have however been overshadowed by the worldwide fascination with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s campaign to prove his son George innocent of wounding a pony in 1903. The popularity of Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005) has had the same effect.

Shapurji Edalji was born in Mumbai in 1841 or 1842, the son of Doralji Edalji, a Parsi merchant. He attended the Elphinstone College, where he was taught by Dadabhai Naoroji and was a classmate of Dinshaw Eduljee Wacha, who along with Naoroji, himself a former Elphinstone scholar, became a founder member of the Indian National Congress in Mumbai in 1885.

In defiance of his family, Edalji converted to Christianity in 1856, under the influence of Free Kirk missionary John Wilson. He was admitted to the Free Kirk College in Mumbai in 1864. He then worked for a year as a missionary among the pre-literate Warli people before becoming an Anglican. He published a Gujerati and English Dictionary (1863), The Brahma Samaja, which was a lecture to the Bombay Dialectic Association (1864), and a Grammar of the Gujerati Language (1867).

In 1866 he travelled to St Augustine's College, Canterbury, to train as a missionary. He stayed in England, however, and was eventually ordained in Oxford. In 1869 he received his first curacy at Burford. Afterwards he was curate at Holy Trinity, Oxford (1869–70), in the Lancashire parishes of Farnworth and Toxteth (1870–72, 1874–5), St Levan, Cornwall (1873–4), and Bromley St Leonard (1875–6).

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