Women’s Education: Curriculum and Content in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries India

The initiation and expansion of women’s formal instruction in India in the pre-Independence time is the legacy of both colonialism and the nineteenth-century reform movement among Indians. The latter, to an extent, was a response to the Westernisation embedded in the colonial processes. In pre-colonial India, institutional and formal education was a rarity for womenfolk, and until the mid-nineteenth century, zenana education or instruction imparted at home was the accepted norm. Several scholars have noted that the nineteenth century saw an intense debate on women’s schooling, especially in relation to the wisdom of educating women, the form it should take, and the purpose it should serve. Historically, women’s education was viewed by most communities as meaningless. Large sections of the population of both Hindu and Muslim communities were content with extending conventional approaches of learning to women and were vehemently opposed to changing it in favour of a modern education either in government schools or missionary schools. At home, women were taught to read religious scriptures and to read and write the vernacular language, although the focus was on learning home crafts and subjects of domestic and practical utility.