Women were taught at home in nineteenth century colonial India because: (a)…

In nineteenth-century colonial India, most social reformers and orthodox families alike treated women's schooling instrumentally: education was valued mainly insofar as it made a woman a better wife, mother, and homemaker, not as preparation for public or professional life. At the same time, prevailing patriarchal norms treated the public sphere -- streets, marketplaces, schools outside the home -- as morally unsafe for women and girls, since it meant contact with strangers, loss of seclusion (purdah), and possible damage to family honour. These two forces together -- the domestic purpose given to women's education, and the fear of the corrupting public sphere -- explain why home tutoring (by private tutors, older male relatives, or self-study) was preferred over sending girls to public schools.

Applying this to the statement: statement (a) matches the domestic-purpose view -- home instruction let girls study while still being trained in household duties, i.e. education was folded into domestic life rather than replacing it. Statement (b) matches the corrupting-public-space fear -- reformers and families genuinely worried that girls stepping into public places such as schools and streets would be exposed to bad influences and lose their moral standing. Both reasons are well documented in the standard NCERT account of this period (the chapter on women, caste, and social reform).

Statement (c) does not fit this history: the reform-era debate over women's education was carried out openly -- reformers wrote, lectured, and published about it, and families that arranged home tuition for their daughters were not trying to conceal the fact from relatives or friends; concealment is not a motive the sources give for home tutoring. Since (c) is unsupported, every combination that includes it must be rejected, leaving only the pair resting on the two well-attested reasons -- studying while managing domestic duties, and staying away from a public sphere seen as morally corrupting. This also matches the official CTET (July 2024, Paper II) answer key for this item.