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Mahbubia Girls' School, founded in 1907 at Hyderabad by the sixth Nizam Mir Mahbub Ali Khan, was among the earliest girls' schools in South India and one of the more remarkable statements of intent by a Muslim ruler of the period. At a moment when the education of girls was barely tolerated even in the great metropolitan centres, the founding of a state-funded English-medium school for girls in the Asafi capital was a deliberate modernising gesture. It set the model for women's education that the seventh Nizam would extend during his own long reign — through the founding of women's wings of the older schools, the Mahbubia Cottage Hospital for women, and ultimately a women's college affiliated to Osmania.
The founding
A girls' school endowed from the privy purse
The school was endowed by the sixth Nizam directly from the privy purse and was placed under the Education Department of the state. Its early staff included English and Anglo-Indian teachers as well as Indian Muslim and Hindu women — itself a notable mixed staff for the period. The curriculum included English, Urdu, Persian, mathematics and the natural sciences.
A model school
The standard pattern for women's secondary schooling in the state
Mahbubia was followed by several other Asafi girls' schools across the state. It became the standard pattern for women's secondary education in Hyderabad and was extended in the seventh Nizam's reign by the addition of higher classes and a teacher-training section.
Continuing life
Among the few pre-1948 institutions still running under its name
The school continues today, on its old campus, as one of the principal girls' schools of the city. It is among the small number of pre-1948 institutions of Hyderabad to have run continuously, under its original name, since the high Asafi period.