The writing style depicts emotions of anger, fear and constant urge to challenge male authority. The story reveals various emotions felt by women facing patriarchal oppression.
She experiences herself as free by first reclaiming a public space where she is not subjected to male gaze and surveillance. The conversion of Ladyland from a male dominated space was conceived as unrealistic by Sultana. Rokeya’s exceptional work Sultana’s Dream is based on an imagined Ladyland where women seem to have access to public spaces without being restricted by social or religious customs. He encouraged Rokeya to write in Bengali which will help her to connect with the common people and she later published Motichur in 1905 and Sultana’s Dream in 1908. Rokeya’s husband, Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hussain was an Urdu speaking, western educated, and ‘liberal’ minded deputy magistrate of Bhagalpur. Rokeya was encouraged by her civil servant husband to continue with her education after marriage. Rokeya emphasised in one of her works that marriage prevented her sister to educate herself. Rokeya’s elder sister was married off before the age of fourteen after being sent to her maternal grandparents place because of her father’s objection to studying Bengali. With constant familial questioning, Rokeya’s brothers educated Rokeya and her elder sister Karimunnessa at home.Īlso Read: 6 Indian Muslim Feminists In History Rokeya’s father encouraged his sons to acquire a Western education and secure a civil servant position in the colonial administration while the female members of the family (no matter what they wanted) were restricted to educate themselves through any educational institutions. The women of the family were under strict observance of Purdah system that secluded them to the domestic realm. It advocates for imagining a feminist utopia which provides a critique of gender itself.Īlthough Rokeya Sakhawat Begum’s work Sultana’s Dream is a feminist attempt at imagining a feminist utopia, named ‘Ladyland’, the story in itself draws a lot of inspiration from her own life experiences as a Muslim girl child born to an upper class Muslim family.
Radical feminism explains that a feminist utopia cannot exist if inequalities exist due to gender binaries and discrimination. A world without patriarchal oppression and gender binaries which is beyond the violence gender itself produces within the lives of people, a feminist utopia imagines a world without gender binaries and gender discrimination. The imagining of feminist utopia focuses on whether a gender equal utopia can exist.