The tumultuous intellectual history surrounding Women's Education in India, both Colonial and Postcolonial, has carved out its own complex trajectory, sorting issues, raising counter issues, struggling to find homogeneity in contrariety. The journey has never been smooth. To highlight the myriad shades, discuss and debate past predicaments or future possibilities of women's education in India, Vidyasagar College for Women, Kolkata organized a two-day UGC sponsored National Seminar in September 2015. This volume of conference proceedings, contemplate gruelling and heart-wrenching issues, foregrounding the conspicuous gender bias in our society. Chronicling women's struggle against patriarchal discrimination, battling adversities and prejudices, refusing to be stereotyped as the 'weaker sex', critiquing dominant patriarchal mindset or faulty educational policies the essays in this volume stand as a testament to the despairing history of women's suffering and endurance.
Pradipta Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of English at Vidyasagar College for Women, Kolkata. She is the author of two books: Shakespeare on the Celluloid: Global Perspectives (2014), and Studies in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (2010) and the co-editor of The Diasporic Dilemma: Exile, Alienation & Belonging (2015). She has published extensively in academic journals specializing in the field of literature and cinema.
Rapti Dev is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit at Vidyasagar College for Women. Her field of specialization is Smriti and has published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Geetanjali Upadhyaya is Guest Lecturer in Sanskrit at Vidyasagar College for Women. She was associated with a number of Research Projects with The Asiatic Society and Rabindra Bharati University. Specializing in Veda, Ayurveda and Manuscriptology, she has published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
In twenty first century India, the aim to achieve gender equality still flounders in a rut. Whether it is the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, the Shani temple at Shingnapur village near Pune, or the prevalent practices of the Jat Panchayat in rural India, discrimination against women is still rife. Particular shrines in the country still persevere with extremely derogatory and stringent norms. Those temples in India still consider a 'woman's touch' as an act of defilement, a clear sign of gender disparity. Women wanting to enter certain temples and mosques are still knocking frantically on the doors of courts.
Us being a women's college, we decided to get more vocal for gender parity, not simply keeping in view the fiery debates over temples, dargahs or Jat Panchayats but several other issues like crimes against women, discriminatory practices leveled against women and the conspicuous gender bias in our society. There was an attempt to conceptualize measures to eradicate existing social evils, (however ambitious it may sound), and to empower our women. Therefore, we decided to start right from scratch by hosting a two day National Seminar on Women's Education. We felt that it was the need of the hour.
The tumultuous intellectual history surrounding Women's Education in India, both Colonial and Postcolonial, has carved out its own complex trajectory, sorting issues, raising counter issues, struggling to find homogeneity in contrariety. The journey has never been smooth. One finds loads of contrariety on its smooth, often overtly polished surface. To highlight the myriad shades, engage and debate past predicaments and future possibilities of Women's Education in India has been our objective.
This volume of conference proceedings, we hope, shall hold a mirror up to society where women, the marginalized 'other', shall see themselves reflected. The essays assembled here contemplate heart-wrenching issues like the injustices women suffer, the hardships of a woman's 'everyday', more so because of the lack of education subsequently barring the way to their economic independence and empowerment.
Dimensions of space, along with time, dreams, memories, senses, (meagre tools may be), but they have been marshaled here in a battle with portly traditions of foreclosure and prejudice. The litany of ambiguities, this sense of being caught, between radical positings of liberal educational environment for women on the one hand, and anxieties thereof leading to oppressive structures, have survived well into the national life of India in the twenty first century.
One of the reasons why the British were unable to establish a lasting legacy of women's education in India was their defective appropriation of the deeply rooted and communally sensitive traditions of indigenous education.
The early story remains obscure because local commentators, playwrights and artists conveyed an unusually diverse range of perspectives that were easily distorted by the Western educational orthodoxy of 'progress' and the 'schooling' of women. - Earlier, too, there had been two competing state-led traditions: Bombay versus Bengal. In Bombay, the Native Education Societies, formed and encouraged by government in the orientalist period, had entrenched Marathi, Gujarati and Parsee local language schools for girls. The genuine interest in nurturing indigenous learning by Governor Montstuart Elphinstone and Judicial Commissioner Erskine Perry gave them unrestricted access to these schools (not granted to their successors), and the husbands of the teaching staff were even employed as government gardeners and the like to provide family financial stability.
Alternatively, developments in Bengal built a powerful pretext for later viewing women's indigenous education through the prism of Victorian moral norms of family, 'character' and respectability, and the use of Western educational models to educate them. This was even before the intervention of Macaulay's famous Minute of 1835, which saw English imposed in all government funded classrooms.
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