Mainstream
Mainstream, VOL LIX No 4, New Delhi, January 9, 2021
Aligarh and Women’s education: a brief overview | Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan
Saturday 9 January 2021
by Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan
Women’s education in nineteenth-century India was no easy task. In the case of Muslim women, the task was even more difficult due to their triply marginal identity: as colonial subjects, as women, and as Muslims. Not only did the custom of
purdah added to their seclusion from the social and cultural changes, their men hated everything about the western cultural influence (being displaced as rulers by the British). As a result, the middle class (the initiators of reform) was to develop late among the Indian Muslims than their Hindu counterparts. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, a middle-class among the Indian Muslims was fledging. For this, no institution of the nineteenth-century can be given more commendation than Aligarh Muslim University.