I was reading an essay by Barnita Bagchi called Female Utopias and Narratives of Education, when I came across the name Rokheya Sakhawat Hossein. The name was familiar and I could vaguely recall that she was an early 20th century reformer who had written extensively about the multifarious oppressions that Muslim women of Bengal faced. In the engaging essay, Ms. Bagchi cites a work of fiction authored by Hossein in which she adumbrated a very radical female utopia. The story is called Sultana’s Dream and the utopia was named ‘Lady land’. Bagchi’s exegesis of the story as an impassioned protest against then-prevailing gender inequities, triggered my imagination and made me look up for information on Hossein.
I discovered soon that there had lived in this country from 1880 to 1932, a visionary who like the Renaissance Men who lived half a millennium before her, felt that education was the key to enlightenment and enlightenment led to empowerment of the silently suffering women. Hossein had herself, much against the wishes of her conservative father, secretly burnt mid-night oil for years to learn Bangla and English. Sultana’s Dream must have across to the readers of the Indian Ladies Magazine in which it was published in 1905 as a humorous tale, a light-hearted fantasy in which an Asian Alice lands in a Wonderland in which everything is rational and realistic except for the fact that women are at the helm of affairs and men have to live behind veil in their Mardana quarters. These two aspects made the story a ‘fantasy’ and the realm in which it is set, a ‘utopia’ yet as I read the story online on http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1128.pdf, I could not come across a single argument or one circumstance that led to the establishment of the Lady-land that seemed incongruous or far-fetched. Sister Sarah, the inhabitant of Lady-land who befriends the wonder-struck protagonist Sultana and takes her there, explains to her how ridiculously irrational is the Purdah system which is foisted on women in India.
“Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?”
The story is a celebration of the scientific ingenuity and industrious demeanour of women-qualities which they are never allowed to hone in the chauvinistic societies because they are made to believe that they are physically frail and vulnerable. Sister Sarah points out the inefficacy of the argument when she says, “A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.” The women in Her land run a government that does not stink of corruption, its universities her headed by women who have invented contraptions that can trap energy from the Sun and water from the clouds as well weapons that do not kill war-mongering enemies but manage to make them concede defeat. The ‘wonders’ that women are capable of are limitless and also, unimaginable in the patriarchal societies existent in the third planet of the Sun and that’s why those are to be termed as ‘wonders’. That probably was the message that Hossein wished to convey to her readers but for me, it had another meaning.
Sultana ‘was dreaming’ of Lady land; it revealed that in dreams is to be traced the inception of visions, revolutions, aspirations; of alternatives that our conscious thinking mind conditioned to reconcile to seemingly insurmountable realities, cannot imagine.
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