The Sikh Kanya Mahavidyalaya at Ferozepur, founded in 1892, was the first institution in Punjab established by Sikhs specifically to educate girls, and it was founded against substantial opposition from within the community.
Bhai Takht Singh travelled across India and to Sikh communities abroad raising money for it, and is said to have gone barefoot as a vow until the school was properly funded.
The school taught Punjabi, Gurmukhi and religious instruction alongside a general curriculum, at a time when the alternative for a Sikh girl was no schooling at all.
Female literacy in Punjab in 1901 was under one per cent. It is now above seventy.
Almost every account of the Singh Sabha lists Khalsa College at Amritsar as its educational achievement. The girls' school at Ferozepur, founded the same decade, is a footnote in most of them.
Bhai Takht Singh and his wife Bibi Harnam Kaur ran the school together and she taught in it until her death in 1906. The institution was as much hers as his.
The opposition was not from the government but from Sikh families who would not send daughters to a residential school. The fundraising tours were as much about arguing that case as about raising money.
The Kanya Mahavidyalaya still runs at Ferozepur. Its early registers, if they survive, would show where its first students came from and what became of them.