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Nineteen-year-old Naorojee Fardunjee, handpicked in 1837 to be secretary and translator to British explorer and political officer Alexander Burnes, was perhaps saved from an early demise in Afghanistan by news of the passing away of his father in India. The young man’s stint with a mission to Kabul was cut short when he learned of the death of his parent in Bharuch and had to return to India. The event "probably saved (his) life,” writes historian Dinyar Patel on www.scroll.in on March 10, 2017. That day marked the 200th birth anniversary of Fardunjee. Diplomatic tensions between the British administration in India and chieftains in Afghanistan "had devolved into the first Anglo-Afghan War…Burnes and his colleagues were killed in 1841 by an Afghan mob,” writes Patel.

 

 

 

 

 

Upon his return to Bombay, Fardunjee  took up "a relatively safer vocation: that of a teacher,” at Elphinstone College, where "he educated many future leaders of Bombay, including Dadabhai Naoroji, Sorabji Bengallee and Bhau Daji Lad” who set up an organization called Young Bombay for religious and social reform in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Fardunjee worked closely with Dadabhai Naoroji on matters of Parsi religious reform and "engaged with a broad spectrum of Elphinstone graduates in promoting female education among various communities in Bombay.”
Fardunjee, according to Patel, found his political footing in 1852, as "the visible force” with The Bombay Association, where elite and young reformers joined hands "to form the city’s first political organization.”Along with Lad, he led the radical wing of the Association, which petitioned the British Parliament in relation to the renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1854, writes the historian. Indian representation in the British Parliament as well as local councils and the appointment of Indians to the civil service were some of the demands. The charter "anticipated much of the agenda that the Indian National Congress (formed coincidentally in the year of Fardunjee’s death, 1885) would put forward more than three decades later,” according to Patel.
Despite opposition from irate fathers who did not see the point of educating female offspring and limited funding from the government, Patel writes that "by 1858, Fardunjee  was in charge of a successful network of Parsi girls schools in the city.” An ardent advocate of public education, Fardunjee was a vocal critic of the British for making government-aided schools unaffordable for poor Indians.
 "The people are burdened with heavy taxes; India is impoverished by the drain of its wealth to the governing country; the people are… shut out from all the higher offices in the public service of their country…” wrote the reformer to British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1871. As could be expected, Fardunjee earned "many enemies within the British Indian establishment... In 1876, the Gazette reviewed Fardunjee’s thoughts on Indian poverty and accused him, along with Dadabhai Naoroji, of promulgating "the extraordinary doctrine that the British Government of this country was an unmitigated curse.” 
Ever the champion of education, in 1880, when the Indian Education Commission spoke about reducing the already paltry government support for Indian schools, Fardunjee warned its members of "disastrous consequences” that would jeopardize efforts "to qualify the natives for self-government.”
H. D. Darukhanawala’s compendium Parsi Lustre on Indian Soil adds to Fardunjee’s list of achievements: he was an Interpreter in the Bombay High Court and was very active in municipal affairs. He is credited with founding the Native General Library and a debating club. "Exaggeration, abuse, sycophancy had no place in his armory,” the short biography lauds.
Fardunjee who played "an outsized role in the political life of colonial Bombay” and was  hailed as a "Tribune of the People” when he died is hardly remembered in modern India, rues Patel, other than as the name of a short lane behind the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay.