Marjorie Sykes

Marjorie Sykes (11 May 1905 – 17 August 1995) was a British-born Indian educator who went to live in India in the 1920s and joined the Indian independence movement, spending most of the remainder of her life in India. She wrote many books and became acquainted with many of the leading figures in Indian politics and culture, including Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.

Biography

The daughter of a village schoolmaster, Marjorie Sykes was born in Mexborough, Yorkshire, England on 11 May 1905. Sykes was nine years old when the First World War broke out, forcing a beloved teacher, who happened to be German, to leave her position.

Sykes came to Madras (now called Chennai) in 1928 to serve as a teacher at the Bentinck School, Vepery, remaining a resident of India for more than 60 years. She contributed enormous effort to advancing new forms of education advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

After an illness, at age 85 years, Sykes moved in 1991 from India to Swarthmore, a Quaker residential home in Buckinghamshire, England, where she remained until her death on 17 August 1995.

The Marjorie Sykes room at Friends House, London, UK is named after her.

Works about Sykes

Sykes' life and work has been the focus of books, chapters, and newspaper articles. In 2005, a decade after her death, the centenary of Sykes' birth was observed in a lengthy biographical article published in The Hindu. An earlier article in Gandhi Marg had also described her life. Sykes was also the focus of an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and of a chapter in a doctoral dissertation in History by Sharon M. H. MacDonald (2010). A book-length biography of Sykes was published two years before her death.

Selected works

Books authored by Marjorie Sykes include:

(133 pages)

(104 pages)

Writings by others that were edited by Marjorie Sykes include: