Bibi Harnam Kaur and the girls' schools

Bibi Harnam Kaur was born in 1882, married at twelve to Bhai Takht Singh, a Singh Sabha worker at Ferozepur, and had learned to read as a child, before her marriage.

With her husband Bhai Takht Singh she built the girls' school at Ferozepur that became the Sikh Kanya Mahavidyalaya. The Kanya Pathshala opened in November 1902, the boarding house was added in 1904 and the Mahavidyalaya was working by 1905. It was the first Sikh girls' school of its kind in Punjab, at a time when female literacy in the province was near zero and educating girls was actively opposed.

She taught in it, recruited pupils by going house to house, and ran it with almost no money. Her husband travelled to raise funds, including to the Sikh princely states and to Sikhs abroad.

She died in 1906 at twenty-four. Bhai Takht Singh continued the school and it survives.

The Singh Sabha's schools for girls, at Ferozepur, Jalandhar and elsewhere, are the origin of female education in Punjab and are attributed almost entirely to the men who raised the money rather than to the women who taught.

She learned to read after her marriage and then taught, which is the ordinary shape of a woman's education in Punjab in that period and is why the school mattered at all.

She died in 1906 at twenty-four. The school continued and it is still running at Ferozepur.

The Punjabi women's magazines and the girls' schools of the Singh Sabha period are a documented movement with almost no published history. The records are in the institutions themselves.

What we don't know

  • Detailed records of the school's early years.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Sikh Kanya Mahavidyalaya institutional history.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 122 accounts in Under the Company, the chapter of this site covering British Punjab, from annexation to the canal colonies.