A revolution that started in a class

Srinagar, Oct 15: On a sunny day in June 1950, a revolution started in a class.

Thirty-five young women, mostly first in their families to step out of their houses, assembled under the Chinar trees in a Dogra palace in Srinagar.

Soon they replaced silence with voice, illiteracy with vision.

Over time, they learned to leave a mark of their own not only on Kashmir’s educational landscape but also in various professions, ranging from doctors and engineers to academicians, pilots, and painters, as well as writers.

Seventy-five years since its founding, the Government Women’s College, M A Road, is now a testament to the empowerment of women in Kashmir.

It is a place where generations of women thronged to learn not only how to read but how to lead.

From a palace of opulence to a center of progress, Government Women’s College, M A Road, entered the fabric of Kashmir’s social life and proved that revolution in the name of education and equality could be sparked with nothing more explosive than a classroom.

The balconies and verandas, the gardens and fountains, once the exclusive preserve of the palace ladies, now resounded with the buzz of ambition.

That sunny June day was not an ordinary day.

It was the day the Government Women’s College, M A Road, came into being – Kashmir’s first-ever women’s higher studies college.

The college is not only an academy of learning, but a living history of Kashmir’s social life.

It is a saga of women who dared to dream and redefine empowerment.

In its initial years, when women’s education was novel in concept, the newly-born state of Jammu and Kashmir desired to have a college in which there would be security and liberty for women.

This was a transformation, an actual power turner in action from seclusion to reality.

It was during the tenure of its inaugural principal, Prof S W Shaw (1950-1954), that the State’s first-ever women’s unit of the NCC was allowed to participate in drills and command training hitherto dominated by men.

It was like sending a battalion within a day and even more.

It was the notion that Kashmiri men and women could resist, write, and dictate their own destiny.

Where Shaw sowed seeds, Prof Mehmooda Ahmad Ali Shah (1954-1974) moulded the empire.

An ideologist oriented in Lahore, Prof Mehmooda was of the opinion that education was the best armour against the dictatorship of tradition.

“I was disillusioned upon my return to Kashmir and saw how women were,” she noted in her reflections published in a special college magazine edition marking 50 years in the early 2000s. “Even to acquire knowledge and gain higher studies was a challenge for them. Fighting this inequality was my mission in life.”

The college thrived as a seat of culture and learning with Prof Mehmooda.

English, Politics, Persian, and Urdu were incorporated into the curriculum.

Shakespeare and Tagore were enacted by students every year at drama festivals in different languages.

Nevertheless, Prof Mehmooda’s greatest challenge was taking learning excursions beyond Kashmir.

While girls never ever ventured beyond the doorstep, Prof Mehmooda went to Bombay, Mysore, and Madras with students.

“It wasn’t an odyssey,” one of her alums said. “It was emancipation.”

Those journeys rewrote Kashmiri womanhood manuals, sending a generation out into the broader world beyond the Valley to pursue careers, politics, and public life.

The torch of change was then handed over to Prof Shamla Mufti (1974-1982), who was an academician, playwright, and social activist.

Her tenure witnessed the rolls of the college surpass 3000.

Its reputation reached heights, and its student population took charge to own the academic as well as the cultural landscape.

Prof Mufti made the campus an avatar of contemporary times with literary icons flocking to the campus, holding multi-lingual drama festivals, and launching social outreach programmes.

Her plays, like ‘Dyad Vetch Nyendri’ (The Grandmother Who Woke Up), captured the essence of generational change sweeping through Kashmiri society.

“Education was in addition to character, self-confidence, and imagination,” said now retired Prof Sakina Hassan, who received India’s first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, on his visit to the college to see plays.

“It was not degrees, it was dignity,” she said.

It was not a celebration party that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah had the privilege of seeing the Silver Jubilee of the college in 1976, but it was a celebration party to commemorate the fact that Women’s College, M A Road, had become the nerve centre of women’s consciousness in Kashmir.

The college continued to be a citadel of courage amidst the torments of the 1980s and the 1990s.

It offered performances of Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, and Ali Sardar Jafri.

Former principal of the college, Prof Nusrat Andrabi, held it in esteem.

“Our college was a playground of intellectuals, poets, and artists. It provided us with the power of ideas,” she once said.

Kashmir changed around the college.

However, the college never lost its bearings.

Continuing with the vision of empowering women through education, the college celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2000.

It was again in the limelight with the visit of President A P J Abdul Kalam in 2003.

The new millennium dawned with a new hope.

Women’s Studies Centre (2006) was a gender thinking revolution at higher education levels.

The collaboration with ISRO’s EDUSAT mission in the same year was a technological revolution connecting Kashmiri women with classrooms across the world.

During floods, lockdowns, and tragedies, the college never wavered, its students and teachers coming over the 2014 floods that had left everything on the ground.

“Close our labs and libraries, but not our spirit,” said a teacher. “We bounced back, because the education of women in Kashmir can’t be relegated to the back burner.”

From conducting international conferences on science, gender sensitisation, and interdisciplinarity to conducting the J&K Women Science Congress, the institution not only continues to function at its potential but also facilitates young women as learners and decision-makers.

“In the midst of the blessedly given past, our college now has doors ajar to wholesome development,” Principal Prof. Yasmeen Farooq said. “We see ourselves reaching out to shape the next generation of confident, compassionate women, who will herald the arrival of Kashmir’s future.”

Alumni of Government Women’s College, M A Road, are placed across the world as teachers, researchers, authors, and artists, carrying with them the college ethos.

Alumnae group Zitni-Zool in college is a pulsating reservoir of niceness and mentorship.

From Sahitya Akademi-award-winning poet Prof Naseem Shafaie to mentoring research project students, every alumna plays a part in shattering the glass ceiling.

Government Women’s College, M A Road, celebrated its Platinum Jubilee on Wednesday, but for its alumnae, it’s not a college.

It’s a revolution bred in a palace and nurtured into an uprising.

Every one of its heritage building stones, every Chinar surrendering its canopy over its courtyard, is a testament to the dream of perfectness and equality of Kashmiri women.

As Prof Mehmooda Shah once eloquently said, “We educated women not just to earn a living but to live freely.”

And this freedom, born in the pages of Government Women’s College, M A Road, still lights the Kashmir sky.