Mushir Fatma: Early Childhood Educator and First Principal of the Jamia Nursery, c.1955–1982

Abstract This paper attempts to outline the main features of the life and educational philosophy of Mushir Fatma (Mushīr Fāt̤imah), who established a nursery at Jamia Millia Islamia in 1955. It relates her efforts to the larger context of pre-school education in early independent India as well as the understanding of the child prevalent in Urdu writings of women’s magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. Using textual sources and oral interviews, it illustrates not only how childhood had become closely implicated in understandings of community and nation, but also how it was central to the history of Muslim women and their public activism. The paper makes three broad arguments about childhood and early education: Firstly, I argue that childhood and early learning were critical to conceptions of national and community revival both in late colonial and early independent India. Female educators like Mushir Fatma are central for understanding ideas and programs about education. Early children’s education thus is an important arena for Muslim women’s participation in national life. Secondly, I argue that women like Mushir Fatma had considerable autonomy to imagine and recreate the space of the nursery, partly due to the limited interventions of the State. Finally, although she worked in Jamia, Mushir Fatma’s life encapsulates what some scholars call the “transnational” in the history of education. The worlds of childhood education and Muslim women’s activism were shaped by the international as much as the local and the domestic.