Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain hardly needs any introduction. Her contribution for Bengali women, especially for Bengali Muslim women, is simply immeasurable. Born in 1880 to a wealthy land owning family in Pairabondh, Begum Rokeya was an educationist, writer, social activist and, simply speaking, the first Bengali Muslim feminist. She was an iconoclast in the best sense of the term. Begum Rokeya died on December 9, 1932 (interestingly she was born on the same day in 1880) and up until 11pm on December 8, 1932, she was working on an unfinished article titled, "Narir Odhikar" or women's rights. At the core of her literary and social work was the firm belief in gender equality and it could be safely said that through it she heralded the discourse into Bengal. She coined the term "manoshik dashhotto" or mental slavery, referring to the absence of individuality that pervaded the entire gamut of Muslim women and attributed it as the root cause for their subjugation. This rings true even today.
From very early age Begum Rokeya assessed the negativity of man ruled social context and discrimination against the women. She exposed the glaring inequalities present between sexes not only among the Muslims but also among other communities. She claimed for equality of women and she was of the idea that men always wanted to make women inferior for their benefit. She compared ornaments with the chain of slaves. She wanted women to come out of their confinement and take part in all spheres of life. In her words, “We constitute one half of the society and if we are left behind, how can the society progress? If a person’s one leg is tied, how far can he go?”
However, many think of her as an active not as a creative genius. She wrote extensively and explored different genres. Her feminist utopian fantasy “Sultana's Dream” is an amazing novella. One is amazed to think how she could visualise a technologically advanced, gender-reversed region, one where men were confined to the "zenana" — the part of a house for the seclusion of women, or as Rokeya terms it, the "mardana" — imagined in the dreams of a woman named Sultana.
Begum Rokeya wrote the novella in 1905 on an afternoon when her husband, a magistrate, was out for inspections of his territory. When he returned from his duties, he asked her how she had spent her time, and she handed him the story, written in English. Thankfully her husband chose to respect rather than repressing her penned rebellion and blessed her. “Sultana’s Dream was published in the Madras-based English Periodical, The Indian Ladies Journal that same year.
Background
Begum Rokeya came from a very orthodox background. She and her sister Karimunnesa was had to observe strict purdah and were only allowed to study Arabic. To her, and the world’s good fortune, she had brothers who supported their sisters. Both sisters were educated on the sly in English and Bangla. It is her difficulty in getting educated perhaps prompted her belief that Muslim women could not gain emancipation without proper education.
With this line of thought and the support of her husband (Sakhawat Hossain whom she was married to at the age of 16 and who died in 1909) and the money he had set aside, Rokeya went on to establish Sakhawat Girls Memorial High School, five months after his demise.
She started the school in Bhagalpur (a majority-Urdu speaking area in erstwhile East Bengal) with merely five students and was forced to shift the school to Kolkata in 1911 due to property feuds with her husband's family. Incidentally it remains one of the Kolkata’s most popular schools for girls and is now run by the state government of West Bengal. In 1916, she founded the Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e-Islam (Islamic Women's Association), which was her other organisational contribution to Bengali Muslim women. Through this organisation she offered financial and educational support to downtrodden Muslim women. In 1926, when she was invited to chair the Bengal Women's Educational Conference, she said, "Although I am grateful to you for the respect that you have expressed towards me by inviting me to preside over the conference, I am forced to say that you have not made the right choice. I have been locked up in the socially oppressive iron casket of 'porda' for all my life. I have not been able to mix very well with people - as a matter of fact, I do not even know what is expected of a chairperson. I do not know if one is supposed to laugh, or to cry."
Coming back to her novella; the messages in “Sultana’s Dream” are not meant for men alone. The men of Ladyland, used to their seclusion and sidelining, have become used to their own subjugation, uninterested in rebellion, obsessed with the cleanliness of their kitchens and the petty details of their invisible lives. In the condescension she heaps on them in “Sultana’s Dream”, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is careful to underscore how the toleration of suffering enables its persistence. The women who bear it in silence allow the perpetuation of oppression and are complicit in its persistence.
Begum Rokeya needs to be celebrated because she herself and her works remain very much relevant. All the currents political upheaval of more than eight decades were not able to erase the core realities that prompted her rebellion. Countless daughters-in-law chafe against long afternoons spent tolerating the demands and dominations of their in-laws, while husbands, the magnetic centres that justify their existence, are away at work doing important things. The mechanics of seclusion, while altered, still dictate a relegation of vast numbers of women, many of them now educated, to the quibbles of kitchens and the dribbles of babies. There, their brains ferment and fester, to fit the moulds of expectations and constraints. Science, which is the pivot on which Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain imagined a reversal of patriarchy, has been unable to save them; the engineers and doctors and architects and nurses are all too weak to destroy the dictates of domesticity.
The writer is Assistant Editor of The Independent and can be contacted, at: [email protected]