Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

If those that have survived are indeed correct, then this past December 9, 2013, would have been her 133rd birthday. In 1880, when Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was born, few records were kept of female births. The women who bear it in silence allow the perpetuation of oppression and are complicit in its persistence. 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 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. The messages in Sultana’s Dream are not meant for men alone. Bit by bit the lies and lassitudes of male superiority are taken to task, unraveled and handed back as formless, meaningless myths. “A lion is stronger than a man,” and yet neither dominates the human race. “An elephant also has a bigger and heavier brain,” is the response. Similarly shredded were the myths of superiority that sustained the seclusion of women: “Men have bigger brains,” the unbelieving visitor to Ladyland interjects to her guide. Her flight into fantasy was a revelatory one in the details of a man-free world, the illogic of an existing women-free one was laid bare. In one short story, Rokeya rendered real the possibility of women being in charge, a reversal unimaginable in a reality steeped in male dominance. With its publication, the silence of seclusion was broken by one who had lived its realities. Sultana’s Dream was published in the Madras-based English Periodical The Indian Ladies Journal that same year. The luck of having an educated husband who chose to respect rather than repress her penned rebellion blessed her.

When he returned from his duties, he asked her how she had spent her time, and she handed him the story, written in English. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote the story in 1905, on an afternoon when her husband, a magistrate, was out for inspections of his territory. As the women of Ladyland say, “Men, we find, are of rather low morals, and so we do not like dealing with them.” Ladyland’s man-less world is one of light and beauty and laughter, without violence and without war the rule of femininity is an end to fear. So says Sister Sara, one of the main characters of Sultana’s Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s story about a feminist utopia, where men are banished and women reign supreme. 'You need not be afraid of coming across a man here.

Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain