When girls demanded swimming pool: College museum reveals its history

Girl students of Indraprastha College had in 1950 demanded a swimming pool in the campus, and when denied, dug the pit for it themselves, archives from the 91-year-old college reveal.
That the students performed experiments in the Chemistry lab clad in sarees with their heads covered are some of the anecdotes on exhibit at the 'Museum and Archives Learning Resource Centre', which was thrown open here today.
"How many of the students who passed out from the college know that such events have happened at the campus here? Girls who used to come with their heads covered and still performed tests in the Chemistry lab or women in 1950s demanding a swimming pool on the campus is something which majority will not believe today," college principal Babli Moitra Saraf said.

"Isn't it thrilling to know that such things happened during the days when, according to the popular notion, the only dilemma was marriage or matriculation? So, we decided to digitise, categorise and arrange such archives in a musuem to not only enable students to know about history and heritage but also offer a rich collection to researchers," she said.
The college, which is an offshoot of Indraprastha Girls' Senior Secondary School founded by a few philanthropists in 1904 in a Haveli at Chippiwara, Jama Masjid, began as an intermediate college in two rooms of the school in 1924.
It subsequently moved to its present premises to Alipur House which was formally inaugurated by Vicerine Lady Linlithgow on February 7, 1939.