On his convocation day address in 1929, Madan Mohan Malviya, the main architect of the Banaras Hindu University, outlined the value of higher education for India’s women. Around the same time he also convinced his close friend, colleague and fellow fund raiser for the BHU, Hari Ram Pande, my great grandfather and my mother Shivani’s grandfather, to send three of his eldest children: two girls and a boy, to Tagore’s Shantiniketan to grow up in a truly emancipatory educational environment as the University they were building settled in the grooves.

To his credit the old man not only sent his grandchildren to far away Bolpur from Uttarakhand, he also nominated his grand daughters by name in his will as co-inheritors with the brothers for the family legacy. My grandmother (at whose wedding he gave her a sari he had spun) used to tell us how when Malviya Jyu(ji) came out of the Arthur Road jail (in 1930) he addressed 50,000 women and told them they should be fearless and capable of guarding themselves. He told my grandfather, at home, yours may be Brahmana Dharma, in the country the only Dharma is the Dharma of freedom, and in the universe it is the Manav Dharma.

That was then. Today, on September 3, 2018, the Kashi Hindu Vishwa Vidyalaya (BHU) of Malviyaji’s and my great grandfather’s dreams, has gone on to inaugurate a three-month training course totally at variance with the values of liberty, equality and fraternity those elders sought to inculcate. At the Vanita Institute of Fashion Design, the IIT department of the University will be teaching a diploma course aimed specifically at training young women into becoming sartorially well turned out, confident and well adjusted daughters-in-law (bahus) who can cope with marriage and their social duties without stress.

According to media reports, Neeraj Srivastava, CEO of Young Skilled India, the company that will be driving the initiative under the banner of, “Daughter’s Pride, Meri Beti, Mera Abhiyan”, said that this course seeks to address a specific need in these socially turbulent times. Banaras we need not remind readers, here is the constitution of the Prime Minister who has repeatedly announced his support for Beti Bachao Beti Padhao. Understandably, the proposed course for ideal daughters in law has his blessings.

In September, two years ago, the young female students of the same university went on a historic Dharna at the gates of the Vice Chancellor’s house to protest against their daily humiliation by age old norms restricting their mobility inside and outside the campus and repeated molestations of hostellers by outsiders who snuck in under cover of darkness. In a tweet, Dr Vivek Tiwari, grandson of one of the elders who helped collect public funds and build this prestigious institute for higher learning a hundred years ago, writes his grandfather would be aghast at this regressive initiative.