Miranda House

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Miranda House is a college for women, forming part of Delhi University, India. It was founded in 1948 by Sir Maurice Gwyer, then Vice-Chancellor of the university. It has nearly 3,000 students in sciences and arts, and is the alma mater of a number of eminent women in or from India. It includes college hostel accommodations for a small number of students, but the majority are day-scholars.

Miranda House, residential college for women, founded in 1948 by the then Vice-Chancellor Sir Maurice Gwyer, is one of the premier Women's Institutions of Delhi University. Veda Thakurdas, the first principal of Miranda House was warned by Maurice Gwyer that many would question her about the name he had chosen for the new college. In answer she was to give any one of the following three reasons:


People thought Carmen Miranda was his favourite actress.


His daughter's name was Miranda.


Shakespeare's Miranda, isolated from the world on that fairy island, reared up and schooled by her father, meets a man for the first time, takes him for a 'Thing Divine' and exclaims, 'How beautiful Mankind is, O brave new world that hath such people in it.'

'Miranda', Gwyer concluded, 'could be a good example for your young ladies in Miranda House.'

Traditions of paternalist reform, those stemming from the imperial, missionary and nationalist enterprises, but also the new dynamic of planned modernisation, played their role in the decision to maintain a women's college in the University of Delhi, instead of relying on private trusts to expand higher education for women. Maurice Gwyer, who had formulated the 1935 constitution for political devolution within the imperial framework, conceived of a residential college for women in the campus in independent India.

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