Montessori schools in India

Montessori's ideas reached India before she did: in 1913 a delegate from the princely state of Mysore attended the first international training course in Rome, and in 1920 Gijubhai Badheka opened the Bal Mandir in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, a pre-primary school inspired by her method. In 1939 Maria Montessori and her son Mario arrived in Adyar, Madras (now Chennai), invited by George Arundale and Rukmini Devi of the Theosophical Society, and gave the country's first Montessori course there, with some three hundred students. When Italy entered the war in 1940 the British authorities treated them as enemy aliens: Mario was interned in a camp and his mother confined to Adyar, though she was allowed to go on training teachers. On 31 August 1940, her seventieth birthday, the Viceroy sent her a telegram saying her son would be returned to her. They stayed until 1946 and came back from 1947 to 1949; in those years Montessori developed Cosmic Education for the elementary years and studied children under three, work that culminated in “The Absorbent Mind” (1949). When she left she named Albert Max Joosten her representative in India, and he carried on her work. The Indian Montessori Foundation, which grew out of the 26th International Montessori Congress held in Chennai in 2009, is the country's AMI affiliated society.