India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity by Jean Dreze;Amartya Sen

Author:Jean Dreze;Amartya Sen [Sen, Jean Dreze;Amartya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-07-29T02:51:00+00:00

6.7. On Female Education

The recognition of female education as a social issue is very recent in India. The dominant Brahminical tradition reserves the study of the Vedas to men of the twice-born castes, and tends to consider female education as a threat to the social order. Female scholars and writers make occasional appearances in Indian history (and there are also many examples of remarkable female intellectuals, such as Maitreyi and Gargee, in the ancient scriptures), but widespread female literacy is a twentieth-century phenomenons' In fact, at the end of the nineteenth century, the female literacy rate was still below one per cent in every province of British India and every `native state', with a few exceptions such as Coorg, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the native states of Travancore and Cochin in what is now Kerala."' Even in Travancore and Cochin, the female literacy rate was below one per cent as late as 1875, and remained as low as 3 per cent in 1901.59

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