SAPNA SRIVASTAVA

Medieval Women's Education Despite such patriarchal norms and prejudice, there were still scores of women poet-saints and writers in the medieval centuries. Thus, Āndāl, Kāraikkal Ammaiyār, Akkamahādēvi, Gangāsati, Lallā, and Mīra have left a legacy of devotional ( bhakti ) compositions in the regional languages. Moreover, one class of educated South Indian women attended schools in public with boys. They were the lower caste temple dancers ( dēvadāsi s) who were rarely Brahman women.  Dēvadāsi s were ritually married to the shrine's deity in South India during the first millennium a.d., and they were the repositories of Indian traditions of dance and music. By the seventeenth century, however, many became court dancers and courtesans outside the norms of female domesticity. Governor Munro's survey of schools in South India in 1822 revealed that, except for the  dēvadāsi s, no other girls studied on the  pyal s in the company of boys.

Education in Early India For much of Indian history, education involved the oral and written transmission of sacred texts, and the acquisition of survival and craft skills. Among some  adivasi s (aboriginals) like the Birhor of Jharkhand, for example, there was greater gender parity in learning the skill of toolmaking. However, Sanskritization and Westernization as "civilizing" agents have today marginalized women's vestigial rights among many tribal communities, which have been integrated into the mainstream society and economy. Artifacts from the literate Indus Civilization (6000–1650 b.c.) include icons of goddesses and the female genitalia ( yōni ) ,  while some seals suggest that there may have been priestesses in an arboreal religion. The inhabitants clearly revered the female in nature, a vision of divinity that persists across India today. However, male power was also venerated, and no evidence exists of a matrilineal society. The absence of gendered spaces in

WOMEN'S EDUCATION WOMEN'S EDUCATION  It is ironic that although Indians have deified knowledge as the goddess Sarasvatī, Indian women have been relegated to educational subservience throughout India's long history. Education means power, which in India remains largely in male hands. The earliest British educational surveys in Madras presidency in 1822 brought to official attention the relative absence of girls in formal schools. In 1881 the Hunter Educational Commission noted that a mere .2 percent of the women in British India were literate, although as in all early colonial surveys, investigators focused solely on school enrollment and failed to count the girls taught informally at home. On the eve of independence in 1947, literacy rates for both genders were abysmally low at 6 percent (female) and 22.6 percent (male). Since then, they have plodded forward slowly but surely, and there has been a noticeable improvement since the 1980s. Thus, in 1961 the literacy rates