Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in IndiaVan Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
History
Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in India
Van Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
Scholarship. Lal Bagh is no longer satisfied with the production of mere
graduates. Her ambition is now reaching out to post-graduate study, made
possible by the gift of an American fellowship. The first to receive
this honor are two Indian members of the faculty, one of them Miss
Thillayampalam, Professor of Biology, whose home is in far-off Ceylon at
the other end of India's world. Henceforth, America may expect to find
each year one member of the Lal Bagh family enrolled in some school of
graduate work. Such work, however, is not to be confined to a
scholarship in a foreign land, for this year the college enrolls Regina
Thumboo, its first candidate for the degree of M.A. Her parents,
originally from the South, emigrated from Madras to Singapore. There
Regina was born, the youngest of five children. The father, a civil
engineer in the employ of a local rajah was ambitious for his
children, and, seeing in Regina a child of unusual promise, sent her
first to a Singapore school, then on the long journey across to Calcutta
and inland to Lucknow. At Lal Bagh she stands foremost in scholarship.
When she has completed her M.A. in history and had her year of advanced
work in some American university, she plans to return to the faculty of
her _Alma Mater_.
Social Questions.
Scholarship at Isabella Thoburn College does not deal exclusively with
the dusty records of dead languages and bygone civilizations. It is
linked up with present questions, and is alive to the changing India of
to-day. Among the matters discussed during my visit were such as: the
substitution of a vernacular for English in the university course; the
possibility of a national language for all India; the advisability of
co-education; and the place of the unmarried woman in New India. To
report all that the girls said and wrote would require a book for
itself, but so far as space allows we will let the girls speak for
themselves.
Co-education.
The Senior Class of eight discussed co-education with great interest,
and when the vote was taken five were in the affirmative and only three
in the negative.
[Illustration]
The following paper voices the objections to co-education as expressed
by one especially thoughtful student:
"Co-education is an excellent thing, but it can only work successfully
in those highly civilized countries where intellectual and moral
strength and freedom of intercourse control the lives and thoughts of
the student bodies. Unfortunately these fundamental principles of
co-education are sadly lacking in India.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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