Sarala Roy

Roy was active in the 1920s in efforts to improve access for education for women and girls.^[4]

In 1905, she established a local women's organisation in Bengal named the Mahila Samiti. and in 1914, created a second organisation called the Indian Women's Education Society, which was dedicated to funding scholarships for women to study in the United Kingdom.^[5][3] She established the Gokhale Memorial Girls' School in Kolkata in 1920, which was named after Indian independence movement leader Gopalkrishna Gokhale, with whom she maintained a close friendship.^[1] Roy trained the teachers at the school herself, and the school made many innovative developments in curriculum, including instructing all their students in three languages: Bengali, Hindi and English.^[1] She had also established a range of extra-curricular educational activities in the school, that encompassed sports, music, and theater, and it was common to perform music and songs composed by the writer and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, with whom Roy was acquainted.^[1] She was also closely involved with the Sakhi Samiti, an organisation founded by poet, novelist and social worker, Swarnakumari Devi which promoted Indian handicrafts and published several magazines and literary journals in Bengali and English.^[6] Her friendship with the Tagore family is reflected in the fact that Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his play, Mayar Khela, to Roy.^[7]

Along with Rokeya Sekhawat Hussain, the Bengali science fiction writer and activist, Sarala Roy and her sister, the teacher Abala Bose, worked with the Bengal Women's Education League in the 1920s, to improve access to education for women and children. In 1927, they organised the Bengal Education Conference from 16 to 19 April, and during this conference, Roy, Bose and Hussain made speeches calling for changes to school curriculum, with a particular focus on increasing awareness of the personal rights of women.^[8] The All India Women's Conference was created in the same year, and Roy, along with Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Muthulakshmi Reddy and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, was a founding member of this significant and powerful women's rights organisation in colonial India.^[9]

In 1932, Sarala Roy became the President of the All Indian Women's Conference.^[10] Roy became president at a time when there was significant momentum towards social reform around the extension of franchise to Indian women.^[4] There were wide differences in opinion on the development of efforts towards achieving franchise for women, and along with Dorothy Jinarajadasa, Radhabai Subbarayan and Begum Shah Nawaz, Roy was instrumental in collecting statements and opinions from women on the subject.^[11] During her Presidential Address, Ray gave a speech arguing that the key to reforms was to strengthen education for girls, and that this would be critical in efforts to end the prevalent practice of child marriage.^[12]

Sarala Roy was the daughter of Brahmo Samaj leader and social reformer Durga Mohan Das. She married Prasanna Kumar Roy, an educator and the first principal of Presidency College in Kolkata, and they had a son, Saral Roy, who died early.^[1] Saral Ray had a son, Sunil Roy (IFS and ardent environmentalist). Sunil Roy was the Indian Ambassador to Poland and Mexico, High Commissioner to Nigeria and the Indian Consul General in New York City.^[13] She also had 5 daughters - Kanakalata Roy, Swarnalata Bose, Nemima Roy, Dolly Maitland, and Charulata Mukherjee, who was also closely associated with the All India Women's Conference.^[1] Kanakalata Roy married Jatindra Nath Roy OBE who was Commissioner of Bengal.^[14] One of her grandsons is Bunker Roy, noted social activist and reformer.

Sarala Roy's siblings were the eminent feminist and social worker Abala Bose who married the pioneering scientist Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Satish Ranjan Das Advocate-General of Bengal and later the Law Member of the Executive Council of the Viceroy as well as founder of The Doon School.

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