What did Sundaria read? Hindi books from Bareilly,c. 1870

Abstract

The Rohilkhand Literary Society, Bareilly, a voluntary association comprising Muslims and Hindus, printed seven instructional books for women in the 1870s. The Bareilly books are a measure of the vibrant Hindi print culture, emerging for women across colonial north India. The books were written in response to new initiatives by the colonial government and by local elite groups for promoting female education. Statistics on girls’ schools in this region remained dismal for decades. At a fundamental level, this essay argues that instead of merely employing school statistics, we reconsider the social history of female education with regard to print culture. The Bareilly books draw upon Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic, Avadhi, Bengali and English sources. They remind us of the multiple instructional and linguistic traditions within which women in this region came to read. The analytical template developed here explicitly foregrounds the range of discourses available to contemporary women readers. To ask the question, what did Sundaria read, is to suggest that women readers were being fashioned in ways that are not always reflected in statistics on schools or official statements by colonial officials.