Fatima Sheikh

Subject – Personalities in News

Context – On January 9, birth anniversary of Savitribai’s fellow pioneer teacher in Pune, Fatima Sheikh.

Concept –

Fatima Sheikh was an Indian educator and social reformer, who was a colleague of the social reformers JyotiraoPhule and Savitribai Phule.
She is widely considered to be India’s first Muslim woman teacher.
Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule along with Fatima Sheikh took charge of spreading education among the downtrodden communities.
Sheikh met Savitribai Phule while both were enrolled at a teacher training institution run by Cynthia Farrar, an American missionary.
Sheikh was considered to be a feminist icon, and in pre-independent India, she had to fight social ostracism and discrimination to bring about a change in the country.
She would take up causes she believed in, like co-founding the Indigenous Library in 1848 — which was one of India’s first schools for girls — along with the Phules.
The efforts that she put in, working alongside the Phules, to provide opportunities to those born in the lower caste, got recognised as the SatyashodhakSamaj (Truthseekers’ Society) movement.
In 2014, Sheikh’s achievements were featured by the government in the form of a profile in Urdu textbooks, along with other such exemplary and resolute educators of her time.