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    Sultana's Dream: And Selections from The Secluded Ones
    Sultana's Dream: And Selections from The Secluded Ones
    Sultana's Dream: And Selections from The Secluded Ones
    Ebook141 pages2 hours

    Sultana's Dream: And Selections from The Secluded Ones

    By Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Hanna Papanek

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    Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopiaa tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world.

    "The Secluded Ones" is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Feminist Press at CUNY
    Release dateSep 2, 2013
    ISBN9781558617353
    Sultana's Dream: And Selections from The Secluded Ones

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    Reviews for Sultana's Dream

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Sultana's Dream is actually a short story and not a whole book, which I didn't realize until it came to an abrupt end. It's about a woman's dream of an utopian society of women who took over the running of their from the men after they suffered a massive military defeat. The story of how the women came to power is my favorite part of the story but it also goes into how they live and what it was like before the women took over.

      I love the idea of these old feminist utopian stories but I also get the fault in their ideas. Women are not inherently better than men, we are simply socialized to think of community and family before ourselves, to be as docile as society can get away with making us, and that giving of ourselves is a higher virtue than taking power. Not all women listen to society and we have come a long way away from this as a gender in Western society while some others are still underived more strict patriarchal societies. I appreciated the mention that good leaders who happen to be women improve things over bad leaders who happen to be men, despite internal biases, that was mentioned in Half the Sky. They dont quite put it that way, but that was my take away from their explamation. It's not so much that one gender is better than the other but that those who believe in inherent superiority of any group tend to mistreat those they believe themselves to be superior than. Hence the reversal of roles in this book but not an egalitarian nor a merit based society.

      Of course, merit based anything is so biased that I hesitate to believe anyone sees it clearly. There have been studies that those with the most merit are actually those who look and think most like the person making the decision. Perhaps this is how we'be ended up with so many diversity campaigns, we must make a special effort to assess merit in those we are less like because different points of view consistently improve things for the rest of us, even if it's only that they sharpen our argument.

      Getting back to the book, though. This is a fun little story about a feminist utopia, a place where women rule over men in the same fashion women were ruled when it was written in 1905.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating collection of work written by three near east feminists. It's short and concise.

      Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This book, and the fact that it's title story was written over 100 years ago, put a lie to the "You've come a long way baby - the fight is over you won" rhetoric. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain spent her life fighting the custom of purdah. Purdah is at one point broadly defined in the book as the practice of setting women aside from society either through the use of distinctive clothing - veils to burqas- to the actual physical separation of women and men in living quarters to make sure women never come into contact with men who are not their "sacred relations". From the introduction in 1981: "Once again, women are being used as the targets of fears and resentments generated by rapid social social change. Repressive regimes and powerful social movements in many parts of the world are once again trying to restrict the human rights of women as part of their attempts to bring to their societies the imagined stability of a mythic past."The first part of the book is a reprint of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 story, Sultana's Dream, about a reverse purdah in which men are kept indoors and women interact in a scientifically advanced and peaceful world. The rest of the book is non fiction commentary on the subject of the oppression of women for political purposes masquerading as religion. There's a brief biography of Rokeya who was a Bengali woman who became famous for writing humorous and caustic articles attacking the concept of purdah. She also founded girls' schools in Bhagalpurl and Calcutta. There are excerpts from her 1928 book The Secluded Ones ( original title Avarodhbasini) which gives personal experiences of purdah. One of the most shocking is of a woman who is falls on railroad tracks and is allowed to be run over because there are no women strong enough to move her and the men acquiesce to her maid's pleas not to assault her virtue by touching her. The afterword is an essay, "Caging the Lion: A Fable for Our Time" by Hanna Papanek written in 1981 and pertinent now. "Many religions want to use women, once again to show that men are right-minded...There is something wrong in the world and one way to fix it is to put women 'in their place'...Purdah, for example, is by no means universal in Muslim populations, and, where it does exist, it varies widely in form and severity...Similarly, in other (Judeo-Christian) religions, ideas about abortion and contraception have varied over time...but are presented as if they have always existed in precisely their present form...Social and religious movements construct what might be called 'synthetic traditions' to embody the goals and needs of the present, clothed in ancient garb to make them more powerful." Papanek states that the imposition of purdah waxes and wanes according to political needs. When Eastern cultures were mobilized to to reject colonial rule women were encouraged to join nationalistic movements, to appear in public in order to portray the culture as modern and able to self govern. Then once independence was achieved they were again encouraged to be humble and modest and stay in the background. (I was reminded here of the way Mormons tout the fact that Utah women had the vote before women in the rest of the country as Utah was seeking statehood.) Of particular interest is her assertion that the reason many women so willingly and completely submit to these laws is that such submission is the only access to power that they have.Parts of this book were written from 1905 to 1981, we face the same problems now, with the same need to shine a light on the use of oppression of women as a mode of advancing or claiming political power.
    • 4/5
      Marking this one instead of the shorter, short-story-only version.

      I enjoyed the context placed on the short story - both with the stories of Begum Rokeya's life, but also selections from her condemnation of purdah, that showed just how bad it was (most of my prior context was from the height of Mughal power, when purdah was interpreted much more loosely for elite women). The commentary also pointed out that interpreting familial relations to be much broader in Sultana's Dream was also a condemnation of purdah, but less obvious to those not raised in it.

      Most utopic fiction is anti-war, but I enjoyed the concepts of solar energy in the story. Also anti-police state.

      The publication date was 1993 in the edition I read - and it read so pre-9/11 that it was sweet. Another snapshot in time.

    Book preview

    Sultana's Dream - Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

    Preface

    IN THIS BOOK, we look at purdah—the seclusion and segregation of women—through three pairs of eyes: those of an early twentieth-century Muslim writer who saw purdah from the inside and campaigned against it most of her life; those of a modern Bangladeshi literary scholar and feminist activist; and those of a modern North American feminist social scientist familiar with South Asia and purdah.

    It is important to introduce Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain to a much wider readership—not only because her ideas are important but also because her short story Sultana’s Dream is a feminist Utopia that antedates by a decade the much better known feminist Utopian novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By bringing this perceptive feminist foremother to the attention of a wider readership now, we hope to remedy a long period of neglect and make it clear that feminist sentiments grow from indigenous roots, without depending on foreign influence.

    We see this book as being useful to three broad audiences. For those students and teachers interested in literature by and about women, here is a well-contextualized introduction to a little-known Asian author. For students and teachers of Asian studies outside Asia, here is an addition that focuses on women’s experiences, which are all too often neglected. For Asian readers, here is an introduction to an Asian author who is not well known outside the language and culture of Bengal but whose experiences resonate for many South Asian readers.

    For all three readerships, however, a sense of history is crucial, for purdah observance is not a uniform phenomenon either in space or time. Changes in political, economic, social, and cultural forces can affect women’s lives with unexpected speed, and not always for the best. Rokeya’s portrayal of women in purdah in The Secluded Ones, her collection of journalistic vignettes, must, therefore, be seen in terms of the rapid shifts over time that have affected purdah observance in South Asia and in view of profound differences not only between cultures but also, within the same society, between classes and regions. Ironically, the excesses of purdah observance described by Rokeya at the start of this century may seem unbelievable to some South Asian readers and all too imaginable to some others in places where purdah is on the rise.

    Sultana’s Dream, a short story, and The Secluded Ones, factual reportage, represent two genres in which Rokeya worked and indicate her central focus on injustice against women. In Sultana’s Dream: Purdah Reversed, Roushan Jahan sets the scene for readers new to Rokeya, telling how Rokeya came to write the story and why it was written in English, and provides a literary analysis of the story. Similarly, in "The Secluded Ones: Purdah Observed, Jahan discusses the significance of these reports in the context of other writings of the time about purdah. In Rokeya: An Introduction to her Life, Jahan provides a broader view of Rokeya’s life, her other writings and ideas, and her activism. Finally, in her Afterword, Caging the Lion: A Fable for Our Time, Hanna Papanek sketches aspects of purdah on a broad canvas, to show not only the diversity of practices called purdah" but the decisive impact of purdah on outside observers of South Asia. Selections from Papanek’s own observations of South Asian purdah include excerpts from the life history of a woman who left purdah reluctantly, under pressure from her husband. In the Afterword, Papanek also discusses some of the underlying forces—especially the social control of sexuality and reproduction—that affect the relations between women and men in societies where purdah exists.

    This book should have been written sooner for we have both been concerned with its subject matter for a very long time. Other commitments—to our families and our other work—have made completion of the manuscript difficult. Our decision to finish it now is the the result of what we see as a rapid deterioration in the rights of women in many parts of the world, in many cultures, and many different religious traditions. Once again, women are being used as the targets of fears and resentments generated by rapid social change. Repressive regimes and powerful social movements in many parts of the world are once again tryng to restrict the human rights of women as part of their attempts to bring to their societies the imagined stability of a mythic past.

    But our work has also benefited from what is part of the response to these attacks on the position of women: the rapid development of action and research on women’s issues throughout South Asia, accompanied by a tangible growth of international feminist networks. We have both been active participants in these activities; in moments spared from research or conference work, we were able to exchange ideas about this book and, eventually, our draft manuscripts.

    The book is also the product of a long friendship. In the twenty-five years we (and our families) have known each other and explored each other’s countries, we have often talked about the joys and problems of being women in our very different societies. The question of purdah has never been far from our minds. Rokeya’s story of reverse purdah became a part of our converstions after Roushan Jahan’s sister, Rounaq Jahan, first told Hanna Papanek about this utopian story in the 1960s.

    Over the years, we have accumulated too many debts to family, friends, and colleagues to recount them all and confine ourselves here to a list of more formal acknowledgements.

    For comments on drafts of all or part of our essays, we thank Dr. Anisuzzaman, Professor, Department of Bengali, Dhaka University; Dr. Riffat Hassan, Professor and Chair, Religious Studies Program, University of Louisville; Dr. Malavika Karlekar, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi; and Dr. Bruce Pray, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

    For many reasons, we are deeply grateful to Hamida Khala and the members of her family who spoke so frankly about life in purdah. We also thank Ela Bhatt, General Secretary of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, Ahmedabad, for sharing with us the story of the union organizer.

    We are also grateful to the Bangla Academy in Dhaka for permission to publish Sultana’s Dream and other excerpts from Rokeya Racanavali, the collected works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which appeared under their sponsorship in 1973. We also thank Women For Women, a research and study group in Dhaka, under whose auspices Roushan Jahan published Inside Seclusion: The Avarodhbasini of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1981), a translation of selected short essays by Rokeya.

    Thanks are also due to Surayia Rahman, the Bangladeshi artist who designed the embroidered quilt (nakshi kantha), a portion of which is reproduced on the cover, and to the anonymous Bangladeshi woman who stitched the entire embroidery. Hanna Papanek, the owner of the embroidery, made the photographs used for the cover.

    In the course of our individual work on purdah and Rokeya, we have each been helped by the support of several institutions that directly advanced our work on the present volume. Roushan Jahan worked on her critical biography of Rokeya while a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Asian Development Studies, Boston University, with a grant from The Ford Foundation (Dhaka). Hanna Papanek received support for research and writing on sex segregation and female seclusion in South Asia from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

    Given the logistical difficulties of prolonged international collaboration, we appreciate the support of the institutions that make it possible by bringing colleagues together at intervals for workshops and study tours. Most important in this connection has been the sponsorship of the United Nations University (Tokyo) of the Comparative Study of Women’s Work and Family Strategies in South and Southeast Asia in which we are both active participants. Study grants from the Smithsonian Institution and the American Institute of Indian Studies for Hanna Papanek’s other research in India are also greatly appreciated.

    Finally, we thank Florence Howe, Susannah Driver, and the staff of The Feminist Press for their patient and helpful support throughout the difficult process of getting a finished manuscript from peripatetic authors living half a world apart.

    Roushan Jahan, Bangladesh, and Hanna Papanek, USA

    Chronology

    Sultana’s Dream: Purdah Reversed

    Roushan Jahan

    SOULTANA’S DREAM, published in 1905 in a Madras-based English periodical, The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, is one of the earliest self-consciously feminist¹ Utopian stories written in English by a woman. It is certainly the first such story to be written by an Indian woman. Its author, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), is the first and foremost feminist of Bengali Muslim Society. One hesitates to use a term that is not context-free, and feminism does mean different things to different people, yet it is the term that automatically occurs to many who read Rokeya’s work now. At the time she wrote this story, she had already attracted considerable attention as an essayist, having published several articles in Bangla dealing exclusively with the subordination and oppression of Bengali women, especially

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