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Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat

Hossain and the movement for women's
education in Bengal, c. 1900–c. 1932
a
Barnita Bagchi
a
Department of Modern European Languages, Faculty of
Humanities, Utrecht University, Trans 10, 3512 JK, Utrecht,
Netherlands

Available online: 04 Dec 2009

To cite this article: Barnita Bagchi (2009): Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the
movement for women's education in Bengal, c. 1900–c. 1932, Paedagogica Historica: International
Journal of the History of Education, 45:6, 743-755

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 Paedagogica Historica
Vol. 45, No. 6, December 2009, 743–755

Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the movement

for women’s education in Bengal, c. 1900–c. 1932
Barnita Bagchi*

Department of Modern European Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University,

Trans 10, 3512 JK, Utrecht, Netherlands
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Paedagogica
10.1080/00309230903335652
CPDH_A_433743.sgm
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602009
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[email protected]
00000December
BarnitaBagchi
and
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(print)/1477-674X
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2009 (online)

This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), urban
Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women
organising themselves in associations to create social change through education
for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to
c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her
colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism and patriarchy, and
created innovative educational discourses and practices. The history of education
is inscribed not merely in the formal school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger
career as writer and builder of women’s associations. An analysis of the
enmeshing of women’s writing and women’s networks thus yields a creative,
nuanced history of women’s education. This paper also connects micro-histories
and macro-histories of women’s education, correlating macro-level data about
Indian non-governmental agency in advancing female education with the work of
individual figures such as Rokeya. The paper analyses Rokeya’s novella
Padmarag (“The Ruby”), showing that the integrated paradigm of women’s
educational and welfarist work found here has many similarities with the actual
educational-welfarist work done by women such as Ramabai, Sarala Ray, or Abala
Bose. Through her activities and writing, often made in alliance with other
educating women such as Sarala, Rokeya gave voice to ideologies and views
widely at variance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British
colonial officialdom. The paper also shows that women of different races and
religions formed networks and alliances, in the transnational British Empire, to
further women’s emancipation and education, in bodies such as All India
Women’s Conference and Bengal Women’s Education League. The paper
recognises how much women such as Rokeya were able to actually be and actually
do in achieving social change in education.
Keywords: education; feminism; women’s writing; South Asia; women’s
associations; fiction

This paper focuses on the work and writing of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932),
South Asian, Indian, and Bengali Muslim educationist, feminist, and writer, placing
her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create
social change through education for women, in the province of Bengal in colonial India,
from c. 1900 to c. 1932. We analyse the work of Rokeya as an educational actor and
writer. We see her as a subject of the British Empire who contested both patriarchy
and imperialism through her work. Her oeuvre shows us how women belonging to
colonised countries such as India created powerful and innovative educational

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online

© 2009 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230903335652
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 744 B. Bagchi

practices and discourses combining feminism and movements for women’s access to
and empowerment through modern education: women belonging to the “peripheries”
of the British empire thus could and did exercise highly articulate agency for women’s
education in the colonial period.
It is symptomatic of Rokeya’s ambition and achievement that “Ladyland” in my
title refers to the utopian country of that name described by Rokeya in her English-
language fictional tour de force, Sultana’s Dream (1905)1: in this feminist fable,
women’s education, in the concrete shape of all-women universities, propels social
change and progress in an imagined country where women rule public affairs, while
men, in a tongue-in-cheek role reversal, remain confined to activities in the private
sphere. Ladyland is the dream-vision and blueprint of Sultana, a recognisably non-
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Occidental woman: the fact that the term signifies a female political ruler clearly
points to how sweeping Rokeya’s goals for Bengali, Indian, South Asian, and non-
Occidental women’s education were. I should also make clear that Indian, Bengali,
and South Asian are all overlapping categories for understanding Rokeya: she was
born in present-day Bangladesh, undertook her mature educational activism in
present-day India, and is recognised today as an iconic figure in South Asia, a region
encompassing India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, and
Myanmar.
Rokeya is seen today, thanks largely to the work of feminist scholars, as a major
figure in the history of women’s activism and education in South Asia.2 A key debate
in the history of such women centres round the place of gender in political and social
reform in colonial India. The contentious issue of social versus political reform
emerged and crystallised in India by the 1880s. Gender and the “condition of Indian
woman” became the crux of the issue. Partha Chatterjee argued3 that from the late nine-
teenth century, Indian male nationalists (such as B.G. Tilak) created an ideology in
which the category “woman” was made synonymous with home, spirituality, and the
unsullied purity of the Indian nation. In the nationalist “resolution” of the women’s
question hypothesised by Chatterjee, the “unpolluted” domain of “home” and “woman”
was distinguished from the public world of male nationalism, which, demanding greater
political liberty for Indians, would have its own independent trajectory.
Education for women figures centrally in Chatterjee’s thesis. He argues that Indian
nationalists created a “new patriarchy” which approved of women’s education,
provided it was disciplined, regulatory, and that it furthered the home–world divide
perpetuated by nationalist ideology. This kind of education would be designed to
inculcate “orderliness, thrift, cleanliness”, “literacy, accounting, and hygiene, and the
ability to run the household according to the new physical and economic conditions
set by the outside world”.4 Chatterjee’s account would see reformist women active in
the field of women’s education, such as Rokeya, as already inscribed into the “new
patriarchy”.

1Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, ed. and
part-trans. Barnita Bagchi (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005).
2Bharati Ray, Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Sonia Nishat Amin, The
World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).
3Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1989), 233–53.
4Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution,” 247.
 Paedagogica Historica 745

An analysis of the careers of Rokeya, and a host of other women bears out,
however, that the “woman’s question” was never resolved in colonial India, despite
attempts on the part of the British colonial state and masculinist nationalism to do so.
Even as far as mainstream male-led Indian nationalism goes, Chatterjee’s account fails
to explain the gender dynamics of the mass mobilisation of Indian women in the
nationalist movement, in the public sphere, under the leadership of a highly feminised
male, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, from the 1920s onwards. Also, by 1927, India
saw the foundation, through the initiative of the Irishwoman Margaret Cousins and
Indian women, of an all-women platform, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC),
which started by working for women’s education, but which soon began campaigning
for political issues such as women’s suffrage.5 AIWC was one of hundreds of such
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women’s organisations in the work of which campaigns for women’s education and
other socio-political issues went hand in hand. It is an obvious point, but one that is
worth emphasising, that women educational actors such as Cousins utilised, and used
as a resource, the transnational and international character of the British empire, which
allowed transactions and conversations between women from regions as disparate as
Ireland and India; such exchanges became, as Kumari Jayawardena has shown,6 anti-
imperialist and anti-colonial on many occasions.
While those working for greater gender equity in colonial India found themselves
caught between the British colonial state and revivalist, neo-patriarchal nationalists
such as Tilak, articulate reformist women active in the field of education challenged
private–public boundaries, challenged Indian patriarchy (both “old” and “new’), and,
through their activities and writing, gave voice to ideologies and views widely at vari-
ance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British colonial official-
dom. Feminist historians such as Tanika Sarkar,7 Uma Chakravarti,8 and Meera
Kosambi9 have been highlighting the work of such women. Feminist scholarship in
Bengali has also been recovering the writings of women, including those by Bengali
Muslim women.10 Meera Kosambi says that colonial western India “enjoyed… a
wealth of women’s articulations… and the problem has been not their paucity but their
retrieval and incorporation as source materials of social history”.11 This is as true of
other regions in colonial India.

5Bharati Ray and Aparna Basu, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s
Conference 1927–2002 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003).
6Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia
During British Rule (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
7Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, A Modern Autobiography (New
Delhi, Kali for Women, 1999).
8Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1998).
9Meera Kosambi, ed. Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
10Major scholarly enterprises include the Bengali Women Writers Reprint series brought out
under the aegis of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. See, for
example, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Rachanasamkalan [Selected Writings] (Kolkata: Dey’s 1991);
Jyotirmoyee Ganguly, Rachanasamkalan [Selected Writings] (Kolkata: Dey’s 2007); Shaheen
Akhtar and Moushumi Bhowmik eds., Zenana Mehfil: Bangali Musalman Mahilader
Nirbachita Rachana, 1904–1938 [Selected Writings of Bengali Muslim Women 1904–1938]
(Kolkata: Stree, 1998).
11Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2007), 34.
 746 B. Bagchi

This paper places itself in the line of South Asian feminist scholarship in its
account of Rokeya and the movement for women’s education in colonial Bengal,
while taking a number of new directions. Rokeya has been considered as a pioneering
feminist of Bengal.12 She has also been considered as a Muslim gentlewoman-
reformer.13 I, however, see the history of education inscribed not merely in the formal
school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger career – first, as powerful writer in the
literary sphere, and secondly, as builder up of women’s associations and institutions
furthering informal processes of women’s development and education.
Drawing on Rokeya’s Bengali writing, in a diversity of genres (letters, essays,
utopian narratives, allegories, and fables), as well as on written records of Bengali
women’s educational associations, I argue that if we are to write a rich and nuanced
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history of women’s education in colonial India, we need to analyse such diverse genres
and modes of writing as source-materials. My account also highlights the various
forms of networks and connectedness between Rokeya and other women active in the
field of educational and social change, such as Sarala Ray, an older but contemporary
Brahmo reformer. Women such as Sarala also formed networks and associations for
Indian women and men during their travel and stay in London, the ruling centre of the
British Empire. I argue that an analysis of the enmeshing of women’s writing and
women’s networks yields a creative, nuanced history of women’s education.

Micro-histories and macro-histories of women’s education

This paper also furthers our understanding of the relationship between micro-histories
and macro-histories of women’s education. Writing a feminist history of women’s
education importantly involves writing micro-histories foregrounding the role of
significant individual women and small groups of women. Such micro-histories
contribute to changing inadequate prevalent versions of macro-history. The relation-
ship is mutually supportive. Recent work in the macro-history of women’s education
has been buttressing the hypotheses that Indian women’s education did advance in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that Indian non-governmental initia-
tive and financial contributions played a major role in such advancement. Analysis of
documents pertaining to women’s education in India in the period 1850–1920 (by
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya et al.) has shown that the number of female students in
schools and colleges in India increased by a factor of eight between 1881 and 1915.
Even so, in 1911, “nowhere in British India more than one per cent of the female popu-
lation had access to education at any level”.14 In such a context, the micro-initiatives
of Indian women assume a special importance for their grassroots base.
Government statistics reveal that Indian nongovernmental and private expenditure
on women’s education in 1850–1920 was as high as 52.22% (for female primary and
secondary schooling) in 1881–1882. The myth that it was a benevolent British impe-
rial government which supported female education, in the face of a passive or hostile
colonised Indian populace, is shattered: as Bhattacharya et al. say, “unenlightened
India bore more than half the cost [of female formal schooling] through private dona-
tion or fees”.15 The share of non-governmental and private expenditure in Indian
12Ray, Early Feminists of Colonial India.
13Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal.
14Sabyasachi Bhattacharya et al., eds., The Development of Women’s Education in India: A
Collection of Documents 1850–1920 (New Delhi: Kanishka, 2001), xxi.
15Bhattacharya et al., eds., The Development of Women’s Education in India, xiii–xiv.
 Paedagogica Historica 747

female education went down to 21.22% in 1921–1922; equally, by that year, govern-
ment expenditure went up, mainly contributed by provincial government expenditure.
This increase in government expenditure owed much to the passing of the Government
of India Act (1919), which devolved limited local self-government to Indians, includ-
ing in the area of education.
Let us correlate these facts with the chronology of two key women agents in the
history of South Asian women’s education, Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), and the
subject of this article, Rokeya. In the early 1880s, we saw, private resources were
contributing the major part of the expenses for girls’ schooling in colonial India. But
there was a public dissatisfaction with the state of female education, and a sense that
progress needed to be made urgently in enrolment, availability of schools, opening of
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higher education to women, and so on. Ramabai’s first major public exposure as activist
for women’s education was her deposition before the Hunter Commission in 1882,
where she spoke up in particular for women’s medical education. She became a
campaigner for the education of girls, women, and child-widows, and built up schools,
asylums, and training institutions for women, lower castes, and the disabled till her
death in 1922. Meanwhile, in Bengal, Rokeya started her school in Kolkata (Calcutta)
in 1911 as a private initiative, and was successful in sustaining the institution. After
much campaigning, her school started receiving very partial, ad hoc government grants.
In 1921–1922, Rokeya was an audible voice in the Bengali literary public sphere (she
published her political allegories “The Fruit of Freedom” and “The Fruit of Knowledge”
at this time) who campaigned in her writing for widening of female access to education.
We thus see that female-led Indian initiative and campaigns for greater public support
of such education at the micro-level were key correlates and determinants of greater
public awareness and resource-generation for female education.

Rokeya’s life and literary networks

Born into a landholding family in east Bengal, Rokeya never had any formal school-
ing. Her conservative father discouraged Rokeya’s impetus to read and learn, but a
supportive elder sister and elder brother helped her pursue her study of English and
Bengali respectively. It was the same elder brother who negotiated Rokeya’s
marriage at the age of 16 to a much older man who respected Rokeya’s powerful
mind. After marriage, Rokeya moved to a provincial town, Bhagalpur, in Bihar,
where her husband was a government official. Rokeya wrote “Sultana’s Dream”
while living in Bhagalpur, and the fable was published in a periodical called the
Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905. This periodical is itself a major source for under-
standing the history of Indian women’s education. The Indian Tamil Christian writer
Kamala Satthianadhan (1879–1950) started it in 1901. Krupabai Satthianadhan
(1862–1894), Kamala’s husband’s first wife, wrote two major novels on Indian
women, Saguna (1894) and Kamala (1895),16 and taught in mission schools. Kamala
herself wrote half the stories in an anthology of short stories co-authored with her
husband on Indian Christian life,17 and the journal she edited published major women

16Krupabai Satthianadhan, Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life (Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari

and Co., 1894); Krupabai Satthianadhan, Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life (Madras:
Srinivasa Varadachari and Co., 1895).
17Kamala Satthianadhan, and Samuel Satthianadhan, Stories of Indian Christian Life
(Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari and Co., 1898)
 748 B. Bagchi

writers such as the poet-nationalist Sarojini Naidu, who in turn wrote warmly in 1916
to Rokeya, after reading an annual report of Rokeya’s school published in the Indian
Ladies’ Magazine.18
By 1904, Rokeya had become a regular writer of polemically feminist essays in
Bengali-language periodicals and reviews such as Nabanoor, Mahila, and Nabaprabha.
Widowed at the age of 29, Rokeya was bequeathed a legacy of Rs 10,000 by her husband
to start a school for girls. Her first attempt to start this school in her marital hometown,
Bhagalpur, proved a failure. Indeed, relations with members of her marital family
became unhappy, and she moved alone to Kolkata. In 1911, she started the Sakhawat
Hossain Memorial School for Muslim girls in a rented house in Kolkata, with eight
students.
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In 1916, Rokeya started the Bengal branch of the Anjuman-e-Khwatin-e-Islam, an

association for Muslim women, which busied itself in welfarist and developmental
work, including sending women into the slums of Kolkata to take literacy and voca-
tional training classes. In 1922, Rokeya became president of two organisations,
Narishilpa Vidyalaya (Women’s Arts and Industry School) and Narithirtha (Women’s
Institution), set up by a male social activist and writer, Lutfar Rahman, in Kolkata, to
rehabilitate destitute women and prostitutes.

Rokeya’s political allegories: women’s education as a cornerstone for freedom

from colonialism
In her anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal political allegories “The Fruit of Knowledge” and
“The Fruit of Liberty”, Rokeya made women’s education the cornerstone of political
freedom for India. Positing causal links between women’s education, women’s
agency, and political freedom, Rokeya argued in the two essays that British colonial-
ism perpetuated itself by using lies, that it disguised as moral welfarism the fact that
imperialism de-industrialised India, and that it offered very few resources for further-
ing Indians’ welfare, in areas such as education and healthcare.
In “The Fruit of Knowledge”,19 Rokeya regards the eating of the fruit of knowl-
edge in the Garden of Eden, through the agency of Eve, in a positive light: Rokeya
thus reworks, from a colonial Indian perspective, a “fortunate Fall”, liberal political
paradigm:

Eve requested him to eat the fruit which was in her hands. Adam too awoke to knowl-
edge on eating the rest of the fruit from his wife. Then he began to feel his own deprived
condition in every layer of his heart. – Was this paradise? This loveless, workless, lazy
life – was this the pleasure of paradise? He also realised that he was a political prisoner…
Now the happy dream of heavenly pleasure, which was in fact ignorance, was shattered
– he clearly felt the wakeful condition of knowledge. 20

In Rokeya’s parable, one fruit from the Tree of Knowledge falls onto the earth, and a
tree is born from it, though human beings are by and large ignorant of the effects of
this fruit. Inhabitants of a country called Paristan or Land of Fairies (allegory for

18Letter from Sarojini Naidu to Rokeya Hossain, dated 16 September, 1916, in Rokeya
Rachanasamgraha [Collected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain], ed. Miratun Nahar
(Kolkata: Viswakosh Parishad, 2001), 619.
19Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain “The Fruit of Knowledge,” in Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 175–
182.
20Hossein, “The Fruit of Knowledge” (my translation).
 Paedagogica Historica 749

Britain and colonising countries) get to drink the juice of some of these fruits and gain
knowledge. Becoming imperialist traders, they exploit the great wealth of Kanakadvipa,
the Island of Gold (allegory for India and other colonised countries), which overflows
with food crops, but whose inhabitants live in a state of innocence. Eventually recog-
nising that their country is being drained of its wealth through unequal commerce with
Paristan, some of the people of Kanakadvipa go in search of the Tree of Knowledge.
To do this, they have to withstand opposition from Paristan, an allegory of the oppo-
sition of imperialists to the colonised gaining emancipatory knowledge. The search
party eventually finds the tree, which is withered. In a dream, a sage appears to the
Kanakadvipa explorers, and tells them:
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Son! Weeping will bring no results… Two hundred years ago, the selfish, shortsighted,
foolish wise men of that country forbade the women to eat the fruit of knowledge; in
time, that order became a social edict, and the men monopolised that fruit for themselves.
Since they were stopped from picking and eating that fruit, the women did not tend or
care for that tree. And since the Tree of Knowledge was deprived of the nurture and care
of women’s tender hands, it died. Go, return to your country; go and sow the seeds of
those guavas… Tend the newly planted sapling, men and women… Remember without
fail that women have all rights to the fruit which they themselves brought to the earth! 21

In “The Fruit of Freedom”,22 Kangalini, the Pauperess, erstwhile queen of the country
of Bholapur, and an allegorical representation of the Indian nation, is shown to be
dying under colonialism. The ablest of her various sons, Layek (“The Capable One”),
dies; the rest are cowards, sycophants of the British, or corrupt (the allegorically
named sons include Darpananda, “One who Rejoices in His Vanity”, Kritaghna, “The
Traitor”, and Matridrohi, “Rebel against His Mother”). We are told that the reason for
the mother’s illness is a curse brought on by an ascetic, due to her treating her daugh-
ters as inferior to her sons. Only the Fruit of Freedom growing on Mount Kailasha can
cure her, she is told. When Kangalini’s cowardly older sons prove incompetent in
bringing back the fruit from the closely-guarded gardens of Mayapur (Land of
Illusion/Fancy, yet another allegory for the colonising country), her daughters Srimati
and Sumati, along with their younger brothers, decide that they will step outside the
home, make the arduous journey to Mayapur, and wrest the Fruit of Freedom. In a
politically symbolic gesture, Srimati unbinds her hair, and says that she will keep it
loose until she is successful in getting the fruit. This is a feminist reworking of an
episode in the epic Mahabharata where queen Draupadi decides not to fasten or wash
her hair until one of her husbands can bathe her hair in the blood of the enemy prince
Duhshasana, who had disrobed her in public. In Rokeya’s story, the defiant woman
herself decides to act.
Thus, in both “The Fruit of Freedom” and “The Fruit of Knowledge”, women’s
active participation in knowledge-making and action is seen as the sine qua non for
overthrowing colonialism. Equally, Rokeya sees knowledge and education in posi-
tive terms, even when originating in or mediated by the colonising countries of the
West: she thinks that to reject knowledge on the grounds that it is “Western” to play
into the agenda of colonialism, which seeks to keep Indians enslaved by perpetuating
ignorance.

21Hossain, “The Fruit of Knowledge” (my translation)

22Hossain “The Fruit of Freedom,” in Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 117–35.
 750 B. Bagchi

Rokeya’s presence as a polemical, uncompromisingly feminist writer in the liter-

ary public sphere made her job as educator more challenging: she could never pass off
as a docile teacher helping to turn out equally biddable girls who would not challenge
patriarchy or colonialism. But her status as writer also gave Rokeya’s work a sharp-
ened edge, greater public visibility, and greater power to mould public opinion about
women’s education.

Rokeya’s female community in Padmarag: a representation of

gendered social capital
Rokeya’s novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”)23 more than any other single work by her,
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presents in compact form her ideas about women as actors in social and educational
change, as teachers, activists, writers, and feminists. I shall first offer an account of
the representation of women as agents of educational and social change in Padmarag,
and then offer accounts of the work that Rokeya’s colleagues Sarala Ray and Abala
Bose did in the movement for women’s education in India. The similarities between
Rokeya’s fiction and real life women’s activism for education in India will be high-
lighted, as will the links and networks binding together such women.
At the centre of the novella Padmarag is a group of adult women involved in a
female-founded and female-led welfarist organisation nucleated in Tarini Bhavan
(Salvation Hall). The eponymous Padmarag (also known as Zainab/Ayesha/Siddika)
is a young Muslim woman thrown upon the world who finds refuge in Tarini Bhavan:
to her astonishment, she finds here Brahmo women, Hindu women, Muslim women,
and even a white British Christian woman (named Helen Horace). The organisation
runs a school for girls, one which takes students from all religious communities. The
leader and founder of Tarini Bhavan is a Brahmo woman named Tarini Sen. Widowed
in her twenties, Tarini sets up an ambitious organisation, housed in her residence,
Tarini Bhavan. The Nari Klesh Nibarani Samiti (Society for the Alleviation of Female
Suffering) is an important constituent of her organisation. So is the school for girls,
which has both day-students and boarders. Adult women with histories of domestic
and familial suffering live in Tarini Bhavan, and undertake teaching and administra-
tive duties in the school. These resident women are called “sisters”, short for sisters of
the poor. But the Tarini Bhavan community is not denominational in any religious
way. Padmarag shows fictionally how women like Rokeya built up social capital –
defined by Robert Putnam as trust, norms, and networks24 that facilitate social organ-
isation and change – to create everyday practices for women’s civil society work in
education, harnessing their cultural and economic capital as educated gentlewomen.25
Tarini Bhavan offers an integrated paradigm of action by women, with education at
the centre: adult women are trained in income-generating schemes, disabled and
homeless individuals are given refuge, and, of course, girls are given schooling.

23Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, ed. and part-trans. Bachi.
24Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 167.
25For an extended analysis of gendered social capital as encapsulated in the writing and
educational work of Rokeya and Ramabai, see Barnita Bagchi, “Ramabai, Rokeya, and the
History of Gendered Social Capital in India,” in Women, Education, and Agency, 1600–2000,
ed. Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, and Maureen Meikle (New York and London: Routledge,
2009), 66–82.
 Paedagogica Historica 751

For Rokeya, the power of women to form associations for various social and
developmental projects is a cornerstone for advancing the condition of women and
women’s education. Padmarag has graphic descriptions of the pleasures and pains of
women working together to run a pioneering school for girls. We also have access to
the letters that Rokeya wrote to the journal The Mussalman, outlining the prospects
and problems of her school. She stated her intention of starting the school using her
husband’s legacy; she asked for private subscriptions to augment this income.26
Another letter by her, published in 1913,27 announced the establishment of a
boarding-house attached to the school. It further stated that the school had obtained a
small grant from the government for this, but that it needed more private contribu-
tions. Another long letter28 gave an account of the fruitless efforts she had made to
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open a Bengali-medium section in her school, owing largely to the parents’ reluctance
to having their daughters taught in any language other than Urdu.
Rokeya was thus articulate about what an uphill task it was to keep the school
going. From a report of the school, prepared by the Sakhawat Hossain Memorial
School Committee, published in 1931, we get to know exactly how much the British
government gave the school by way of financial support, through ad hoc, intermittent
grants, and under what heads: the largest sums of Rs 5000 (1926) and Rs 4725 (1928)
were disbursed for buying school-buses.29 It was only after Rokeya’s death that the
school became a fully government-aided school.
Behind Rokeya’s fictional Tarini Bhavan, its school, and its women’s association
lurk many real-life institutions and organisations founded by and for women, from the
late nineteenth century onwards. In Western India (in Mumbai, Pune, and Kedgaon)
Ramabai had founded the institutions Sharada Sadan (Hall of Learning), Kripa Sadan
(Hall of Mercy), and Mukti Sadan (Hall of Freedom), for high-caste Hindu widows,
rescued prostitutes, and lower-caste and disabled men and women respectively.30
These institutions are reflected in Rokeya’s Tarini Bhavan. Rokeya knew Ramabai’s
work, as evidenced by her mention of Ramabai in an essay.31

Rokeya, Sarala, Abala: female connections and associations in educational work

The importance of Padmarag as a text encapsulating Rokeya’s educational ideals and
practices was recognised by Sarala Ray in her obituary of Rokeya:

She was a handsome, dignified, little woman… with a very large heart which bled only
for the improvement of the education of her own sex of the country. She was one of those
true Mahomedans to whom ritual and tenets were only means to attain a larger religious
vision of life… To her Hindu and Mahomedan had no difference. I respected her for her
struggle in building up of the school, for her great loyalty to her ideals of life and for the
beautiful characteristics of Indian womanhood… One of her books, “Padmaraga” gives
us some idea of her own ideals of life. All her publications are beautiful… in infusing
social and educational ideals of life amongst women… 32

26Letter dated 10 February, 1911, in Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 525.

27Letter dated 10 January, 1913, in Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 530.
28Letter dated 30 November, 1917, in Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 531–5.
29Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 596.
30For Ramabai’s own accounts of these institutions, see Pandita Ramabai through Her Own
Words.
31Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 364.
32Rokeya Rachanasamgraha, 583.
 752 B. Bagchi

As a woman from one religious community pays tribute to the educational work of a
colleague from another religious community, we are reminded of Rokeya’s essay
“The Worship of Women” (1906)33 which depicts her belief in the possibility of
vigorous, constructive conversation, debate, and action to further women’s rights
among women of different faiths.
Tarini Bhavan, Ramabai’s Kripa and Mukti Sadans, and the institutions founded
by Sarala Ray (1861–1946) and her sister Abala Bose (1864–1951) are all very simi-
lar. Sarala and Abala belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist, syncretist sect
founded by Rammohan Ray in the nineteenth century. Sarala passed the University
Entrance Examination, but did not continue with a college education after her
marriage at the age of 16. She is best known for starting a school for girls, the Gokhale
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Memorial School, in 1920 (the school and an associated college, Gokhale College,
continue to exist). The school was named after her close friend, the moderate nation-
alist leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale (who campaigned for women’s education and
who, in 1911, proposed in the Imperial Legislative Council a Bill, thrown out by the
British government side, to make elementary education free and compulsory through-
out India). Sarala’s school became known for its rigorous teaching, and its inclusion
in the curriculum of subjects such as Hindi, comparative religion, domestic science,
and physical education. Lakshmibai Rajwade offers a vivid account of how the private
and the public came together when Sarala, after the death of Gokhale in 1915, decided
to start a school in his memory:

Her own large house, No 7 Ballygunge Circular Road in Calcutta – with its grounds, was
immediately turned into a hostel for the girls of the school, Mrs Ray and Dr Ray retaining
a few rooms for the personal use of themselves…Her own servants went over to look
after the comforts of the students… The woman, who had always found a three-storied
house small, now lived on one floor of it with her family… 34

Sarala was involved, like Rokeya, in a very large variety of women’s organisations.
In the early 1880s, when she was living in Dhaka in east Bengal, she founded the Mahila
Samiti (Women’s Association) there. When she moved to Kolkata, she co-founded,
along with Swarnakumari Devi, the Sakhi Samiti (Women Friends’ Association). The
society had a range of activities. It helped orphans and widows, firstly by giving them
financial aid, secondly by educating them, and thirdly by spreading women’s education
through their agency: the educated widows were trained to undertake “zenana educa-
tion”, that is, they taught women by visiting them in their homes. Such zenana teachers
were remunerated for their work.35 The society also held successful exhibitions of the
handiwork of women.
When Sarala lived with her husband in London, she founded the Indian Women’s
Education Association. This, states Abala in a memoir of her sister, aimed to establish
scholarships for Indian women to study in teacher training courses in England.36

33Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, “The Worship of Women,” trans. Barnita Bagchi, in Talking of
Power: Early Writings of Bengali Women, ed. Malini Bhattacharya and Abhijit Sen (Kolkata:
Stree, 2003), 105–15.
34Lakshmibai Rajwade, “Sarala Ray,” in Sarala Ray Centenary Volume, ed. Sarala Ray
Centenary Committee (Kolkata: Sarala Ray Centenary Committee, 1961), 104.
35Lotika Ghose, “Social and Educational Movements for Women and by Women,” in
Bethune College and School Centenary Volume 1849–1949, ed. Kalidas Nag and Lotika
Ghose (Kolkata: Bethune College Centenary Committee, 1949), 129–169.
36Abala Bose, “Amar Didi” [My Sister], in Sarala Ray Centenary Volume, 89.
 Paedagogica Historica 753

While the focus of this paper is not Sarala’s work in England, it is noteworthy that a
local colleague of Rokeya’s, Sarala, while she was based in Britain, showed initiative
in campaigning for more resources to get Indian women teachers trained in Britain.
Sarala and her Association became well known for providing a supportive home away
from home to Indians studying in England. Sarala also became president of the All
India Women’s Conference in 1931, and in her presidential address raised issues
pertaining to women’s education. She was also known for her encouragement of
female singing, dancing and other kinds of performance: at her request, Rabindranath
Tagore wrote a dance drama called “Mayar Khela” (The Play of Fancy), performances
of which were then organised by Ray to raise funds for women’s societies.
Sarala’s sister Abala was just as active in educational work. Among the many
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institutions founded by Abala were Nari Shiksha Samiti (Society for Women’s
Education), started in 1919, which ran hundreds of schools throughout Bengal, espe-
cially in rural Bengal. In order to train teachers for the Nari Shiksha Samiti schools,
Abala started the Vidyasagar Bani Bhavan, which would train widows to be teachers,
as well as teaching sewing, weaving, tailoring, leather-work, and embroidery. A
sister-institution, the Mahila Shilpa Bhavan (Arts and Industry Society for Women)
gave adult education to women, with a simultaneous stress on teaching cottage indus-
tries. Abala also started an Adult Primary Education Centre, with an endowment left
by her husband, the famous scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose.
Sarala, Abala, and Rokeya were all involved in the Bengal Women’s Education
League (BWEL) founded in 1927. The genesis of BWEL lay in a decision of the
Association of British University Women in India to appoint a special committee,
which then convened the Bengal Educational Conference from 16 to 19 April 1927.
The members of the committee included Rokeya, Sarala, Abala, Cornelia Sorabji,
Sakina Muwayyidzada, Lotika Ghose, Sister Caroline Elizabeth, and Theodora
Wright. It was thus a body comprising women from many denominations and commu-
nities. At the conference, Abala, for example, spoke on the state of primary education
in Bengal, and ways of bringing it within the reach of every child, Rokeya spoke on
the scope of curriculum in primary schools, while Sarala spoke on the scope of curric-
ulum in secondary schools. BWEL, constituted at the first Conference, continued to
hold annual conferences, was strongly based in Bengal, and functioned as an influen-
tial body dominated by women educators from all denominations working in
Bengal.37 We had seen that Sarala campaigned in Britain for scholarships to get
Indian women teachers trained in Britain, and that she then did much work in local
and national level bodies in India: she thus worked at both the trans/international level
and locally. BWEL, too, was born out of a decision of a body spanning Britain and
India, the Association of British University Women in India – and the conference
became the nucleus of a league which brought together British and Indian actors of all
religious denominations in the sphere of women’s education. Clearly, multiple nation-
alities and levels of women educators could and did create productive networks for
furthering women’s education in colonial India.
However, we should also note that Rokeya’s founding, administration, and parti-
cipation in associations for women’s welfare and education was very strongly based
at the local level. Just as she prioritised writing in Bengali, she also worked very much

37For an account of the work of the BWEL, see Barbara Southard, The Women’s Movement
and Colonial Politics in Bengal: The Quest for Political Rights, Education and Social Reform
Legislation, 1921–1936 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 148–210.
 754 B. Bagchi

with a Bengal base and centre. She did not make trips abroad, including any to Europe
or North America; nor did she correspond with women activists outside India. While
her imagination is highly international (moving from Afghanistan to England to many
other places in her writing), she was neither affluent enough nor formally educated
enough to work directly with bodies such as the Federation of University Women in
India. (The Federation, founded in 1920 and affiliated to the International Federation
of University Women in 1921, brought together the Association of British University
Women in India, founded in 1913, and the Bombay Presidency Women Graduates
Union, founded in 1915 by the UK-educated, affluent lawyer Cornelia Sorabji.)38 Nor
did Rokeya work with the International Council of Women, as her younger friend and
biographer Shamsunnahar Mahmud did.39 To understand the many layers (notably the
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local, the regional, and the global) in the history of women’s education and women’s
associations, we need both to map individual lives, such as those of Rokeya and
Cornelia, and to map the history of particular associations.

Rokeya and female educational agency: an agile, resourceful impetus

This paper has analysed the movement for female education in colonial India, espe-
cially female-led campaigns and initiatives, as a resourceful, agile, creative, and
complex impetus, which, in the hands of figures such as Ramabai, Rokeya, and many
other reformist women, negotiated and challenged both British colonialism and neo-
patriarchal Indian nationalism. Rokeya argued in her writing and showed through her
work that it was possible to make positive capital of the pains and multiple depriva-
tions in women’s lives. She first emerged as an articulate writer in the literary sphere,
where she formed networks and connections with other women writers, both in
English and Bengali. She then founded a school for Muslim girls, and continued to
write innovative, daring feminist and anti-imperialist essays and sketches. In the
1920s, when the Indian national movement was in full swing, Rokeya wrote bold
parables such as “The Fruit of Freedom” and “The Fruit of Knowledge”, which
brought together and linked her anti-patriarchal and anti-imperial perspectives: she
argued that women’s education forms the cornerstone for India’s political emancipa-
tion as well as social emancipation. Her novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”) describes a
female community in which formal education for girls, vocational training for women,
and a feminist society of women who have experienced patriarchal oppression, are
integrated. Such women are drawn from different races and religions. Rokeya’s
colleagues Sarala Ray and Abala Bose campaigned in England and India to further
women’s education of various kinds, from non-formal to formal education, from
school to vocational education. Women from different races and religious denomina-
tions did indeed in real-life colonial Bengal come together to form successful and
influential associations such as the Bengal Women’s Education League. While
Rokeya worked locally, she had colleagues from different regions and countries. The
transnational character of the British empire facilitated the emergence of a strong
women’s movement (which paradoxically took on an anti-imperial slant) campaign-
ing for women’s education in early twentieth-century India, a movement in which an

38For a historical biography, see Suparna Gooptu, Cornelia Sorabji: India’s Pioneer Woman
Lawyer: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
39See Barnita Bagchi, “Two Lives: Voices, Resources, and Networks in the History of
Women’s Education in South Asia,” Women’s History Review (forthcoming).
 Paedagogica Historica 755

Irish feminist such as Cousins and a Bengali, Indian feminist such as Rokeya both
played important roles.
Instead of downplaying the agency of colonial Bengali women in the history of
education, we need to recognise how much women such as Rokeya were able to actu-
ally be and actually do (to use Amartya Sen’s notion of functionings and capabili-
ties)40 in achieving social change in education. The educational writing and work of
Rokeya, Sarala, and Abala, and many others among their educating sisters yield
concrete insights for understanding the past and present of educational deprivation and
change in South Asia.

Notes on contributor
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Barnita Bagchi is assistant professor in literary studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She
was previously a member of faculty at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, India and
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India. Her published books are
Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors: Narratives of Female Education by Five British
Women Writers, 1778–1814 (2004), a critical edition (and translation of one of the two constit-
uent narratives) of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Femi-
nist Utopias (2005), and a volume, edited with D. Sinha and A.K. Bagchi, Webs of History:
Information, Communication, and Technology from Early to Post-Colonial India (2005). Her
translations of Bengali women’s writing have appeared in volumes such as Talking of Power:
Early Writings of Bengali Women from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2003) and The Imperma-
nence of Lies (1998).

40See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).