Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: Fatima Sheikh

Mains level: Pioneers of girl child education in India

fatima

Teaching pioneer Fatima Shaikh was recently honoured with a Google Doodle on her birthday.

Fatima Sheikh

Fatima Sheikh was an educator and social reformer, who was a colleague of the social reformers Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule.
She is widely considered to be India’s first Muslim woman teacher.
Fatima Sheikh was the sister of Mian Usman Sheikh, in whose house Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule took up residence.
One of the first Muslim women teachers of modern India, she started educating Bahujan children in Phules’ school.

Association with Phules

Under pressure from upper castes, Jyotirao’s father evicted Savitribai and Jyotirao from the family home in the late 1840s.
With nowhere else to go, the Phules would find shelter at the house of Mian Usman Sheikh, where they would live till 1856.
As many from their own community abandoned them, Fatima Sheikh and her brother stood strongly with the Phules and the mission to educate girls and bahujans.
Sheikh met Savitribai Phule while both were enrolled at a teacher training institution run by Cynthia Farrar, an American missionary.
She taught at all five schools that the Phules went on to establish and she taught children of all religions and castes.
Sheikh took part in the founding of two schools in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1851.

In Pune, a conservative bastion of culture and tradition, the very act of trying to educate the underprivileged caused uproar.
It is said that the two women would often have stones and pieces of dung thrown at them while walking in the streets.
Fatima specifically is said to have borne the wrath of both upper-castes and radical orthodox sections.