To discuss women's education in colonial India, students could refer to the…

An autobiography is a first-person account in which the author narrates the events of their own life; historians treat autobiographies as primary-source testimony distinct from polemical essays, fiction, or narrative epics written about other people.

Applying that definition here: of the four listed works, only Amar Jiban (1876) is a first-person life narrative — Rashsundari Devi wrote it herself, describing how she secretly taught herself to read and write at a time when formal education was denied to most women. Because it is her own testimony about her own struggle for literacy, it is the standard primary source cited when discussing women's education in colonial India, and it is why the saved key selects it.

Checking the other three works against the same test confirms none of them is a colonial-era autobiography:

• Stripurushtulna (Stri Purush Tulna), published in 1882 by Tarabai Shinde, is a polemical essay arguing against the double standards applied to men and women — an argumentative critique, not a first-person life narrative.

• Sultana's Dream, published in 1905 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, is a short work of utopian science fiction imagining a society with reversed gender roles — an invented story, not an account of the author's own lived experience.

• Manimekalai, traditionally attributed to the poet Sattanar, is an ancient Tamil epic poem composed many centuries before the colonial period — a narrative poem about a fictional character, not a colonial-era first-person account.

This is confirmed by the CTET (January 2021, Paper II) official final answer key, which marks Amar Jiban as the correct answer to this question; Amar Jiban is also the primary source most commonly cited in NCERT/CBSE social-science material when discussing colonial women's education.