Girls getting schooled: an old Bengaluru story
Not Sophia High School, Canarese (Kannada) girls’ school on Mission Road predates Sophia’s by, hold your breath, over one hundred years.
Two weeks ago, on August 3, the city’s venerable Sophia High School celebrated its 75th birthday with much fanfare. For the legions of girls who have passed through its portals since it was first founded, less than two years after India’s independence, the anniversary served as an occasion for an outpouring of nostalgia and gratitude for their Alma Mater.
Old as it is, however, Sophia’s is by no means the oldest girls’ school in Bangalore. That honour belongs to a Canarese (Kannada) girls’ school on Mission Road that predates Sophia’s by, hold your breath, over one hundred years.
The impetus towards modern institutional education for girls (and boys) in India was provided, in many ways, by the British Charter Act of 1813. Among other things, the Act extended the East India Company’s rule for the next 20 years, granted permission to Christian missionaries to travel to India to promote ‘moral and religious improvements’, and sanctioned a sum of ₹1,00,000 annually for the education of Indians.
Unfortunately, that funding lay unused for two decades, stymied by bitter unresolved debates between the Orientalists (who wanted to use it to promote traditional education in classical Sanskrit and Persian to Indians) and the faction led in later years by British MP, Thomas Babington Macaulay, which believed western education in English was where it was at.
In 1835, Macaulay’s impassioned report, ‘Minutes on Education in India’ which argued in favour of English education for Indians, and the support it received from the then governor-general of India, Sir William Bentinck, gave victory to the latter faction. The English Education Act of 1835 made English the official language of India, and the language of higher education.
Meanwhile, on the missionary front, the first Wesleyan Mission in India had been established in Madras as early as 1817; by 1821, Rev Elijah Hoole had not only set up a branch in the Bangalore Cantonment but also applied to the Government of Madras for permission to set up a school for the native population. While Macaulay and his ilk wanted to teach Indians English to create a sympathetic workforce that could help the British administer the country, the missionaries were doing the opposite – mastering Indian languages to be able to deliver sermons, translate the Bible, compose hymns and build bonds with local communities. Missionaries in Bangalore Cantonment and Pettah were also keenly reading Kannada, Tamil and Telugu literature, and translating both religious and secular texts from those languages into English.
Both Macaulay and the missionaries, however, were also keen to bring modern ideas and education – including maths, geography, literature and the sciences – to Indians. To this end, the Wesleyan Mission set up, for the first time, printing presses in regional languages, to print vernacular Bibles, original research work on culture and customs, and, of course, school textbooks.
Which brings us back to the question of the oldest school for girls in Bangalore. Never mind that the Wesleyans got here first, it was the London Missionary Society (LMS) that beat them, and the Cantonment, to it. Well before 1855, when the Wesleyan Tamil Girls School (known since 1905 as the Goodwill Girls High School, and located on Promenade Road), came up, Mrs Sewell and Mrs Rice (wife of Rev Benjamin Rice, and mother of the great Kannada epigraphist BL Rice), had, in 1840, set up the Canarese Girls School in the Pettah.
Once the Wesleyans and the LMS merged in 1920, that school came to be called the United Mission School; post 1947, it was christened the Mitralaya Girls School. To this day, 184 years after it was first founded, Mitralaya, like Goodwill, continues to educate and empower the girls of Bangalore.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)