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.

Early accounts are striking for the degree of support, which the idea of a campus college for women got from the government of newly independent India and from the University administration. The scheme, the land and the funds seem to have been sanctioned to Gwyer in a remarkably short time, and the Minister for Works, V.N. Gadgil intervened when the cement supply ran out. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the godmother of the college, presided over the unveiling of a portrait of the father figure, Maurice Gwyer, in 1952. There was an aura of brave new world' about it all - but, in some personal narratives the tragedy of partition seeps in at the edges.

The number of students stepped up steadily from the 122 recruited in 1948, jumping sharply, from 1247 in 1965 to 2086 in 1967, a figure around which admissions have stabilised. This dramatic influx put a strain on space and resources. However, in these same stressful years, the Miranda House faculty expanded and the science departments began to come into their own. Miranda House pioneered the introduction of science courses for women in Delhi University, the pass courses commencing in 1963 and the Honours in 1971. A laboratory wing was added in 1967, and Botany and Zoology introduced in 1975.

The old college buildings, built in warm red brick with cool and spacious verandahs, owe their design to the architect Walter George. The hostel is laid out in a pleasing quadrangle, its gardens paced out by bottle palms, the design allows a spacious privacy, within which residents of the hostel can walk around in any old garments, and be as rowdy as they like. The dining hall is one of the assets of the college with monastic tables and benches set along a long hall.

As one looks over the decades, there are some key activities which seem to have been important for the students of Miranda House, through which they qquestioned the boundaries set for women. The first is of how women students were to relate to campus life, and of how they could claim the right to move within it without harassment and molestation. One of the stated objectives of the college was to give women students a chance to prove their mettle on the same platform as male students, in activities such as debates and dramatics. The college union also drew the institution into the wider currents of campus life. At times it provided a platform for concerns important to the woman student, though often the flow of important issues can be traced along more decentralised if less permanent channels.

In the 1950s Miranda House was put on the itinerary of many a visiting dignitary and the image of modern yet disciplined women students constituted the point of commendation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s Miranda was outgrowing its image as a show-piece for the modern yet docile female student. The affiliation to the University union was accompanied by a widening of the interest taken in contemporary politics, particularly on the issue of student participation in administrative decision-making. In such contexts the college administration would sometimes view Miranda's campus location as a liability. There have been other venues through which students of this college have sought to formulate a point of view about their relationship to wider society. Aloke was set up in 1949 with the idea of organszing social welfare activities, which would knit the college with its neighbourhood. The hostel students who ran this organisation also had an aspiration, however sporadic, to draw in children from the neighbouring shanties. Humanitarian sentiments often pulled the students of Miranda House into the public sphere, even if an affiliation to organised politics or to sustained social welfare activity was restricted to a narrow number. Generations of women who have passed through the portals of the college are contributing to the life of the nation in significant way - as politicians, writers, theatre personalities, artists, directors, media personalities, educationists - they are highly visible and vocal, often evoking responses, that they carry the mark of a Mirandian. Currently the broad consensus within the college seems to be that it will have to find its destiny within the broader women's movement of this country rather than in defensive gestures which confirm the symbolic burdens which society imposes on young women.