Place · Christian liberal-arts college · India
St. Stephen's College, Delhi
Also known as St. Stephen's, Stephania, St. Stephen's College, Stephen's
The Cambridge Mission's college at Delhi, founded in 1881 by Samuel Scott Allnutt and Charles Freer Andrews on the Christian liberal-arts model, affiliated to the University of Calcutta until 1922 and to the new University of Delhi thereafter. One of the most prestigious undergraduate institutions in India, with alumni including N.R. Narayana Murthy, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha and six Rhodes Scholars in the 2000s alone. The college's chapel and the Walled City campus from 1941 are the architectural anchors.
- Date
- 1881–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- Cambridge Mission
- Tradition
- St. Stephen's College records; Cambridge Mission archives; biographies of C.F. Andrews.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.688, 77.212
Worth knowing
Charles Freer Andrews, who taught here from 1904 onward, is the single most consequential tie between the college and the national movement — he introduced Sadhu Sundar Singh to the Delhi Christian community, corresponded with Gandhi for decades and spent his later years at Shantiniketan.
Connections (2)
- Affiliated withSadhu Sundar Singh
Sadhu Sundar Singh's long association with St. Stephen's College in Delhi began through C.F. Andrews, the college's most consequential teacher of the 1900s and 1910s, who introduced him to the Delhi Christian community and later arranged his Western lecture tours. Sundar Singh addressed the college chapel several times through the 1910s and 1920s in his saffron sadhu's robe, and the Stephania community adopted him as the Indian Christian figure to its Protestant mission; through Andrews the connection also tied him to Gandhi and Tagore at Shantiniketan.
- Site withinDelhi
St. Stephen's College sits on the University of Delhi's North Campus along the Cambridge Mission's original 1881 site in the walled city, moved to its present campus near Civil Lines in 1941. The college is one of Delhi's defining institutions — the Cambridge Mission's foothold in the capital, the training ground for a hundred and forty years of Delhi's English-speaking public culture, and the anchor around which the North Campus itself was planned when the University of Delhi was established in 1922.