Banga Mahila Vidyalaya

Banga Mahila Vidyalaya (Bengali Women’s College) was the first women’s liberal arts college in India. Established at Kolkata (then known as Calcutta) on 1 June 1876, by the liberal section of the Brahmo Samaj, it was successor of Hindu Mahila Vidyalaya (School of Hindu Women) set up on 18 September 1873 by Annette Akroyd. Banga Mahila Vidyalaya was merged with Bethune College on 1 August 1878. The short-lived Banga Mahila Vidyalaya not only laid the foundations for higher education of women in India, it was the pivotal issue which fostered the second split in the Brahmo Samaj. David Kopf says that while the immediate cause for the split in the Brahmo Samaj in 1878, was the marriage of Keshub Chunder Sen’s daughter to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, ‘’women’s emancipation was the major issue of the 1870s.”

When the Brahmo Samaj split for the first time in 1866, all the progressives within the organisation, including Keshub Chandra Sen, Sivanath Sastri, Sib Chandra Deb, and Durga Mohan Das, were together. Their thinking about most matters related to the Brahmo Samaj matched. The parting of ways started in the early 1870s, and one of the issues on which they differed was women’s education.

The writings of Theodore Parker, the socially active Unitarian, had a profound impact on the Brahmo Samaj thinking. Mary Carpenter, a British follower of Theodore Parker and daughter of Ram Mohan Roy’s Unitarian friend, Lant Carpenter, also had a positive impact on Brahmo Samaj thinking. During her first two visits to India, Mary Carpenter met the Brahmos and asked them to extend the American and English efforts at women’s emancipation to India. Among her more devoted supporters were Monomohun Ghosh, whom she had occasion to meet when he was in England, attempting first an entry into the Indian Civil Service and then the English bar in the early and mid sixties.

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