Born in England in 1871, becoming a priest in 1896, leaving the avocation in 1899 for poor health, Charles Fryer Andrews reached India in 1904 as a teacher at the Saint Stephen’s College, Delhi. His was an uncommon life, a life that had two birthdays – one February 12, the day when he was born in England and the other March 20, 1904 the day on which he set his foot on India for the first time.  Most of his life was for India and the Indians, and in the course of this he earned for him the nicknames of deenabandhu (which means ‘the relative of the poor and dispossessed’), and ‘the wandering Christian’ for the type of life he lived, a life devoted for the helpless and the hopeless.

He was the second of the thirteen kids of his parents. The father was an evangelist. The large family could not pull on with his meager income and their life was rather in deep distress. In spite of this, young Andrews managed to pass into the Cambridge University with the support of scholarship and came out in flying colors in Greek and Latin (1896). And in the same year he was posted as a priest, but finally he reached Cambridge to teach in the college for religious studies. While at the Cambridge Mission, he was invited to be a teacher at the St. Stephen’s College of Delhi. It was thus that he landed in India on 20th March, 1904. He found in India a new and different world of human thought in all its possible diversities. He saw to his great surprise that the Indian religious thoughts had a lot in common with the Christian outlook. India’s gravitational force of its culture overwhelmed him. And he became an admirer and slowly a spokesperson for India’s freedom. During one of his visits back to England, he made public speeches against the shameful and discriminatory policies pursued by the British ruling class in India. It was during another visit to London that Andrews met and Poet Tagore and this resulted in a life-long association of the two in which the poet was the mentor and the priest the disciple.