The Quest for Teachers of the ‘Right Stamp’ as Prerequisite to Progress of Female Education in Eastern Bengal: The Partition Interlude

The aim of this paper is to document this experiment of the British Raj with female education that has not previously been examined. The Committee’s ideas and activities and the bureaucracy’s reaction to those ideas form crucially important documents for charting the course of female education in the early 20th century. These invaluable documents in the holdings of the National Archives of Bangladesh have so far escaped the notice of scholars. The paper also investigates the rhetoric of intention and implementation in the face of political reality in the case of the short-lived province of Eastern Bengal and Assam (1905-1911).