Isabella Thoburn College

Traversing back in history, more than 128 years back Isabella Thoburn College was the first Christian College for women in Asia. Ms.Isabella Thoburn – the young teacher, was the first woman Methodist missionary to sail to India in 1869, after the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS), of the Methodist Episcopal church was formed in Boston to champion the cause of women in India. The history of the School and then College has been an arduous journey, though a fruitful one-from a school of one-room in the dusty Aminabad bazaar, the starting point of Ms.Thoburn, on April 18, 1870, with just six girls, to being named Christian Girls’ Boarding School (a year later), to the relocation for better facilities to Lal Bagh (meaning “Ruby Garden”), – the house of the treasurer of the last Nawab of Avadh, to an important development of a college-level class added to the Lal Bagh curriculum. This led to the formation of The Lucknow Woman’s College, which began functioning on July 12, 1886 with Fine Arts, affiliated to Calcutta University and later to Allahabad University. Ms.Thoburn was aware of a greater need. She wrote to church friends in the U.S.A. The need of India today is leadership from among her own people, leadership not of impulsive enthusiasm or of prejudice, but of matured judgment and conscientious convictions. Part of our work as missionaries is to educate and train the character that can lead, and it is to accomplish this that we formed our first Women’s college in the eastern world. After Ms.Thoburn’s death in an attack of cholera in August 1901, the College was named Isabella Thoburn College, in her memory, while the junior classes came under Lal Bagh High School.