Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado

Msgr Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado (Romanised Konkani: Sebastav Rodolf Dalgad; 8 May 1855 – 4 April 1922) was a Portuguese Catholic priest, academic, university professor, theologian, orientalist, and linguist.

Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado was born on 8 May 1855 in the village of Assagaõ, Bardes concelho, Portuguese Goa,[1] to a family of Goan Catholics belonging to the Bamonn (Brahman) caste.

After a brief stay in Lisbon in 1884, he returned to Goa as a missionary, where the then Patriarch of the East Indies, Don António Sebastião Valente, appointed him as the inspector of schools and workshops of the Padroado do Oriente and as a professor of Scripture and Canon Law at the Seminary of Rachol, where he formerly studied.

Subsequently, he was intensely involved in religious activity in India, and then became vicar general of the island of Ceylon, particularly of the Portuguese mission in the city of Colombo, which had been abolished by Concordat of 1886.

When he was vicar general of Ceylon, he declined to accept the bishop's mitre that the Congregation of Propaganda Fide had offered him, probably in the context of the dispute between Portugal and the Holy See on the extent and powers of the Patronage of the East (Padroado).

His other work included The Indo-Portuguese Dialect of Ceylon, published in 1900 in Contributions of the Geographical Society of Lisbon, done in commemoration of the centenary of the European discovery of sea route to India.

In view of its studies published, in 1907 he was appointed Professor of Sanskrit in the Curso Superior de Letras, which was founded in 1859 by D. Pedro V in Lisbon.

The funeral eulogy was delivered by Canon José de Santa Rita e Sousa, professor of the Escola Superior Colonial, where he taught the chair of Konkani language.

The Brazilian philologist Dr. Solidonio Leite said that "Monsignor Dalgado could undertake and carry out those works that attest to exceptional value of this great man".

Along with Shenoi Goembab and Joaquim Heliodoró da Cunha Rivara, Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado is widely considered to be a pioneer in the defence of the Konkani language.