25 years of service to women's education

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, JULY 15. The Maharani's Arts College for Women, the only institution in the City to provide undergraduate education for women in Kannada medium, has turned 25. The government college, which made a difference to scores of girls over the years, has turned a new chapter. The jubilee celebrations begin next month.

With a strength of 2,600 students, the college has proved the government and academicians wrong on the latter's assessment of the popularity of general education and higher education in the Humanities. This academic year, the college admitted 520 students for its Bachelor of Arts programmes, 125 students for B.Com, 50 for Bachelor of Business Management (BBM) and 20 students for its M.A. (Economics) course.

On the threshold of a landmark, the college principal, Prof. N.G.Subhavani, drew attention to the institution's growing student strength, a sort of reversal of the general trend elsewhere: ``The strength is increasing every year and each year at least 200 students fail to get admission in our college.''

Incidentally, every year about 200 students from the rural areas of Bangalore, Kolar, Tumkur, Hassan and Chitradurga are admitted to the college.

Government schools and colleges elsewhere have always been known for the wrong reasons: Inadequate infrastructure, teaching faculty which do not meet standards and students who cannot match up to the competitive world outside. Perhaps, the Government has some lessons to learn from Maharani's College. As the college principal puts it, ``Mere IT education cannot solve our educational problems. We need teachers who are trained in Social Sciences and Humanities. The present day neglect of Humanities is only going to worsen the situation. It is imperative that the government give priority to the strengthening of at least the well established colleges.''

Though Maharani's Arts College for Women found its separate identity in 1974, it has an unbroken history of over 70 years. In 1974, the erstwhile Maharani's College was bifurcated as two entities, the Science and Arts colleges.

The history of the college, as Prof. Subhavani puts it, began in 1881 when the royal family of the then Mysore State opened a high school for girls in Mysore which became the nucleus for Maharani's College. ``The then King of Mysore had a liberal and modern attitude and was an advocate of education for women. That high school became the first one in the country to provide modern education for women.''

Thereafter, the Government of Mysore took charge of the school, made it into a college and affiliated the institution to the University of Mysore. The college was shifted to Bangalore in 1939 and it began functioning in a small bungalow on Palace Road.

During the 1950s, the Maharani's College was one of the six colleges in the country selected for international study exchange programmes. The college commenced classes in Humanities subjects only in the 1960s. And in 1975, when the number of B.A. students increased in thousands, the Maharani's Arts College found its independent existence. Today, the college offers 15 combinations and languages including Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu and English.

In its silver jubilee year, the college proposes to inaugurate an Old Students' Association and with its help take up development works of the college. Among the old students who once gave life to the college campus are the Minister for Women and Child Welfare, Ms. Motamma; former MP, Ms. Taradevi Siddhartha; Ms. Shyamala Bhave, Ms. Nagavalli Nagaraj, Ms. M.S.Sheela, Ms. B.R.Manjula, Ms. Sumithra, Ms. Ramamani, noted artistes, scholars and writers such as Ms. Sunadara Shri, Ms. Padma Shri, Ms. L.V.Sharada, Ms. Bharathi, Ms. Uma Shivakumar, Ms. Vimala Rangachar, Ms. Anusuya Kulakarni, Ms. Maya Rao, Ms. Nirmala Devi and Ms. T.Sunandamma.

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