Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: A Feminist Voice from an Unexpected Place

2021

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Muslim women in general were absent in earlier feminist scholarship. However, feminist scholars have become increasingly aware of the communal bias informing earlier exclusionary tendencies. In recent years, there has been spurt in research on Muslim women's writings with scholars trying to retrieve Muslim women's lost voices and

Colonial Muslim South Asia had two leading cultural centres: Bengal and North India. As part of the far-reaching reformist movement during the colonial period and beyond, intellectual work from these two places included a powerful segment of feminist writing which has remained the harbinger of the women’s rights movement among Muslims of this region. It is important to give research attention to South Asian Muslim writers, many of whom have been marginalised mainly because of the dominance of, and sometimes overriding and disproportionate focus on, their Hindu counterparts. Against this background, this article discusses the life, incredible commitment, sacrifice and feminist accomplishments of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). It will also contextualise her ideas in the broader South Asian Muslim feminist tradition.

2017

In 1905 the writer, educator and reformist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana's Dream, a fictional short story discussing the dream realm Ladyland, where women built and ruled a utopian society while men lived in seclusion. In previous discussions of science fiction tropes within the text, scholars have assumed that the essentialised concepts of gender and science presented by Rokeya are the product of a comparative discourse of feminist science fiction texts, which responded to global issues of scientific, technological and ideological modernity. By drawing connections between ideas from such a broad literary discourse, previous approaches have displaced the significance of the individual text as a source from 20 th century India, failing to recognise that the tropes and methods of science fiction deployed in Sultana's Dream were the product Rokeya's owns needs in the construction of a feminist argument. This essay will argue that the act of writing science fiction needs to be recognised as an act of resistance. I propose that Rokeya deploys the tropes of dreaming, history and modernity in order to argue that gender norms are constructions, the nature and impact of which are dependent upon the relative context and the balance of social, economic and technological power between genders. To demonstrate this, I shall first outline the limits of previous approaches, before conducting an analysis of how inversion, juxtaposition and subversion are important aspects defining feminist science fiction as resistance.

International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities (IJELLH), 2019

That Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) is a renowned feminist in general terms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengali literature is an established critical view. Previously nascent in the writings of her immediate predecessors, her emergence in the rich literary spectrum of her time has not only introduced feminism as a complete trend of writing, but contributed heavily to making a respectable world for the neglected women of the age and beyond. But she has been partially and narrowly categorized as a Muslim or Islamic feminist because of her inclination for changing the lot of the suppressed, oppressed, deprived and secluded Muslim women of the period. This view falls short of properly weighing her writings and so, needs more distinctively elaborate evaluation and categorization for a better understanding of feminist approach ingrained in them. Therefore, the paper investigates the type of Rokeya's devout feminism on a theory-based analysis. For this purpose, it simultaneously discusses her unique contribution as a social worker towards female emancipation to make a world of their own and critically analyzes her literary stance from liberal feminist discourse.

An International Journal of Asian Literatures, Cultures and Englishes, 2016

This paper examines four women writers who have contributed through their writings and actions to the awakening of women in Bangladesh: Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein, Sufia Kamal, Jahanara Imam and Taslima Nasrin. The first three succeeded in making a space for themselves in the Bangladesh tradition and carved a special niche in Bangladesh. All three of them were writers in different genres – poetry, prose, fiction – with the last best known for her diary about 1971. While these iconic figures contributed towards women’s empowerment or people’s rights in general, Taslima Nasrin is the most radically feminist of the group. However, while her voice largely echoes in the voices of young Bangladeshi women today – often unacknowledged – she has been shunned by her own country. The paper attempts to explain why, while other women writers have also said what Taslima Nasrin has, she alone is ostracised.

Asiatic, 2018

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain came from and wrote for a colonised, marginalised society. Hence, the question of the silenced subaltern voice and agency, and of subordinate experiences of non-Western writers is pertinent to the discussion of her work. She is a subaltern not only because of gender and colonialism, but also because of her ethnic, religious and other identities. She is subordinated as a writer of a colonised society and marginalised as a Muslim feminist scholar. Various factors that contributed to her subalternity were enmeshed together and became grounds for her marginal status among regional and global feminist writers. Based on this theoretical background, this article will discuss the term "subaltern" and examine factors that contributed to Rokeya's subalternity.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) was a pioneering feminist writer, educationist and activist in colonial Bengal, who not only sought to emancipate women from the deeply entrenched values of Indian social and cultural patriarchy through her darkly satirical and provocative writings, but also actively pursued her idea of empowering women through education by setting up a school for Muslim girls. This article will investigate Rokeya's feminist ideology and her educational programmes undertaken for the betterment of Indian women, especially Bengali Muslim women. I intend to argue that although born into an orthodox family and brought up in strict purdah without any formal education, Rokeya had that rare foresight and courage to challenge the social status quo of her time and ridicule many of the outmoded gender practices in her writings, and even turn gender relations upside down by creating a Ladyland in her utopian narrative Sultana's Dream ([1905], 1908), in which men are confined to indoors while women run the state. Moreover, she was practical enough to reify her vision by taking steps to eradicate women's ignorance and invigorate their sense of self, by setting up a school in Calcutta and by running programmes to educate slum women through the association for Muslim women, Anjuman-i-Khwateen-i-Islam, which she founded in 1916—all at a time when Indian Muslim women were expected to live in confinement in the zenana and any attempt to educate them was seen as blasphemous.

IN MY doctoral study titled Introducing Rokeya’s Plural Feminism (University of Portsmouth, 2007), I sought to unearth the rich treasure of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (1880–1932) feminist writing and to compare it with that of two established English feminist writers, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and two postcolonial ones Attia Hosain (1913-98) and Monica Ali (1967). My comparative study aimed at introducing Rokeya and her work to a wide-ranging readership and at revealing the relevance of her overarching feminist ideas to international feminisms beyond the borders of the South Asian subcontinent.

FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ACROSS CULTURES, 2022

This collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars and graduate students to shed light on literary texts in English through the lens of feminist theory. With its wide-ranging aspects on the feminist movement since its inception with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the book explores literary representations of female voices from diverse cultures and communities around the world. This book presents women’s struggle within the tight grasp of patriarchy in the works of female writers from diverse communities ─ Dorris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Betty Mahmoody, Azar Nafisi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ann Bonwill (translated by Burcu Ural Kopan) ─ and one male writer ─ Khaled Hosseini.