#radha kumar

By the mid-19th century women's education had become an issue which was campaigned for by unorthodox Hindus, Brahmos, and radical students in Bengal, especially Calcutta. Fears of the evangelical intentions of missionary schools were aired at the same time as Brahmo and Hindu schools for girls were opened in Bengal, and were partly responsible for their opening. While the missionary schools of the early 19th century had been attended largely by girls from poorer families, these new schools catered to girls of the upper-castes. First forays into the zenanas (women's quarters), or andarmahals as they were known in Bengal, also began to be made at this time by campaigners for adult education for women. Known as the 'home education' movement, these forays too were initiated by English, Scottish, and North American missionaries, who were, within some years, joined by Brahmos. Over time, the curricula were adopted by Brahmos to suit what they felt were Bengali requirements. The movement for  women's education is generally described as having been formed by the need of a rising middle class to adapt its women to a Western milieu. With the growth of British education and new employment opportunities for men, the public private dichotomy grew into an opposition between the world and the home, rather than a complementarity of the two. To put it crudely, instead of being a sanctuary (or indeed, even while remaining something of a sanctuary), the home began to represent the dead weight of traditions which were scored as bigoted or barbaric. It had, therefore, to be reformed and brought into complementarity with the new world outside. Sumanta Banerjee has described how the traditions of the andarmahal were brought under critical scrutiny, especially insofar as they concerned entertainment through popular cultural forms such as song and recitals (kirtans, panchalis, kathakathas). Under colonial influence, the bhadralok (Bengali gentry) learnt to view these forms as low and 'obscene': from the late 18th to the end of the 19th century both missionary and administrative literature abounds with horrified descriptions of the abandonment which 'even' upper-class natives enjoyed both in religious ritual and entertainment. Nor is it surprising that the ribald humor of popular Bengali songs, in particular, drew disfavor from the Victorians who condemned so much of their literary heritage as being lewd. The bhadralok began to frown upon popular, traditional songs and recitals within the andarmahal as exposing women to wantonness and vulgarity; at the same time, women's enjoyment of such entertainment was described as indicating their 'natural' tendency towards depravity. (This latter view is of course entrenched in traditional Hindu conceptions of feminine nature). Women's education, thus, was a way of both detaching upper-caste women from any contact with 'the vulgar masses', and of curing them of their latent vulgarity.