Person · 9 December 1880 – 9 December 1932 · born 1880 · writer, feminist thinker, educator

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Begum Rokeya)

Writer of Rangpur and Calcutta whose Sultana’s Dream, published in Madras in 1905, imagines a country where the men are kept in seclusion, and who founded the Muslim Women’s Association in 1916 — the first Bengali Muslim woman in this archive to speak in her own printed words.

"One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not." — opening lines of Sultana's Dream (1905), read at the Wikisource text of the story.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed first draft. It has not yet been checked by a subject reviewer — see sources and method.

What she made and did

Rokeya wrote Sultana's Dream, a feminist science-fiction novella first published in The Indian Ladies' Magazine (Madras) in 1905, in which the sexes' public roles are reversed and women run a solar-powered, purdah-free "Ladyland" while men are confined to the mardana; Matichur (1904 and 1922), a two-volume essay collection; Padmarag (1924); and Abarodhbasini (1931), described as "a bold critique of the extreme purdah system" [wiki-rokeya].

Five months after her husband Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hossain's death in 1909, she established a school in his memory, the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School, starting in Bhagalpur with five students; a property dispute with her husband's family forced its move to Calcutta in 1911 [wiki-rokeya]. "She is said to have gone from house to house persuading the parents to send their girls to her school" and "ran the school despite facing hostile criticism and social obstacles" until her death [wiki-rokeya]. In 1916 she founded the Muslim Women's Association for women's education and employment, and in 1926 she presided over the Bengal Women's Education Conference in Kolkata [wiki-rokeya].

What the sources did with her afterward

Bangladesh observes Rokeya Day on 9 December, the anniversary of both her birth and death, and the government confers the Begum Rokeya Padak on women for exceptional achievement; in 2004 a BBC poll ranked her sixth among the Greatest Bengalis of all time [wiki-rokeya]. That later honour sits against the sources' own account of what it cost her to run the school in her lifetime: sustained "hostile criticism and social obstacles" from the community she was recruiting from [wiki-rokeya].

Sources