The British Library

My, My !!! The pleasures of being in London. Just being able to work in the British Library is every thing one could ask for. When, I was in Maulana Azad National Urdu University, MANNU, we were working on a Project on Madarsa education and in the State Central Library we came across some reference to memoirs of a Miss Wyld. She had come to start the girls school in Hyderabad. I had desperately searched for this, down the years in many libraries but never found it. Sitting with a friend at Birkbeck, I just mentioned this and she opened the mobile phone and looked at the catelog and reserved this for me. I was not sure but the second day, I went at 9.30,I was told that, I will get this at quarter to twelve and lo they handed me a box with about 450 documents and said, I was to go and sit at the tables with yellow signs. This meant, this was precious and I could not take photographs but notes I could take, and never leave this material unattended and had to hand it back to the desk, even if I left for few minutes. They in turn kept my Library card with them. The green desks meant you can take pictures through your mobile. I looked at the box with amazement and in front of me were typed papers in a much faded yellow colour. Miss Wyld had come to Hyderabad in 1909, having to run a girl's school which had started in 1907.She found that except for the building nothing existed and this is an excellent memoirs of hers on her difficulties, an unmarried women, the issues she faced in an alien country and its culture, climate, language and how difficult it was to make sense of many practices. But she loved the school, she adopted it and ran her school efficiently starting with four students to increasing this to 100 with in a span of a short time. She talks of festivals, fairs, transport, disease, health, schooling, purdah, nautch, life of a woman,floods in Musi, coronation of the Nizam and many more incidents. There were 42 Chapters and I could read only half of this. This memoir was written when Wyld became blind at ninety and learnt to touch type. It is an amazing account of her recollections with such a sharp wit and tendency to note the details and the beginnings of girls education in Hyderabad. I had not carried my lap top on the first day, so I returned back around 1.30,making some notes. Today, I was there at 9.30 with my lap top and did not move till they announced at 4.30, that now all the manuscripts have to be handed over. I could not but help smiling as, I read her account of how when the correspondence became increased in Urdu, she asked the

Government to appoint a Babu. After a month of following it up, she finally got a Babu, after all the paraphernalia of maintaining Purdah and seeing that he does not come in contact with any Muslim girl or women. She asked him what his name was and what he had studied. He said very proudly that he was BA Fail and she said, she was so sorry that he had failed and hoped he would pass soon or next year. She found that the Babu was very offended and it was only later that she understood how great an achievement this was and some thing of an accomplishment that he was distinguished enough to have had at least given the exam. There were so many other incidences talked about and I must have looked crazy to others for I kept smiling at many places in between as I read the manuscript. This took me into a flight of imagination as to how Hyderabad must have been in 1909.I am so over whelmed with the staff that is so helpful and eager to help.