14 Facts About Sarala Roy

Sarala Roy was an Indian educator, feminist, and social activist.

Sarala Roy was one of the first women to matriculate from Calcutta University, and was the first woman to be a member of the University Senate.

Sarala Roy founded a school for girls and several women's educational charities, and was a founding member and later, the President of the All India Women's Conference.

Sarala Roy was a strong supporter of educational rights for women and girls.

Sarala Roy was the daughter of Durga Mohan Das, a prominent social reformer, and her sister, Abala Bose, was a noted educator.

Sarala Roy was active in the 1920s in efforts to improve access for education for women and girls.

Sarala Roy 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.

Sarala 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.

Sarala Roy had 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.

Sarala Roy was 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.

The All India Women's Conference was created in the same year, and Sarala 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.

In 1932, Sarala Roy became the President of the All Indian Women's Conference.

Sarala Roy became president at a time when there was significant momentum towards social reform around the extension of franchise to Indian women.

Sarala Roy later had two daughters, Swarnalata Bose and Charulata Mukherjee, who was closely associated with the All India Women's Conference.