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Research Paper | History | Volume 13 Issue 5, May 2024 | Pages: 1894 - 1900 | India
The Role of Western Education in the Emancipation of Indian Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal
Abstract: This article examines Western education as a contested resource in the emancipation of women in nineteenth-century Bengal. It moves beyond the familiar claim that female education was simply a colonial gift and instead locates girls' schooling within a complex set of negotiations among missionaries, the colonial state, Bengali reformers, families and women learners themselves. Drawing on a historical-interpretive approach, the study utilises colonial education reports, institutional histories, autobiographical writing and major scholarship on gender and colonial modernity, it argues that Western-style education expanded literacy, created schools and examination systems, supported women's entry into teaching and medicine, and supplied a critical language through which oppressive customs could be questioned. Its benefits, however, were profoundly unequal. Access remained concentrated among urban, upper-caste and middle-class families, whilst curricula often prepared girls for respectable domesticity rather than equal citizenship, and male reformers frequently defined women's interests on their behalf. The histories of Bethune School, Banga Mahila Vidyalaya and women such as Rassundari Devi, Chandramukhi Basu, Kadambini Ganguly, Swarnakumari Devi and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain reveal both the possibilities and the limits of this educational order. Emancipation is therefore understood here as a gradual expansion of literacy, mobility, professional choice and public voice. Western education became most transformative when Bengali women appropriated its institutions and redirected its knowledge toward their own social and intellectual purposes.
Keywords: women's education, colonial Bengal, emancipation, Bethune School, bhadramahila, social reform, colonial modernity
How to Cite?: Partha Banerjee, "The Role of Western Education in the Emancipation of Indian Women in Nineteenth-Century Bengal", Volume 13 Issue 5, May 2024, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1894-1900, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR24523201138, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR24523201138