Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is not an unfamiliar name to women’s studies departments in our universities or to those who study the history of Indian feminism through the ages. She may, however, be unfamiliar to those who do not quite associate feminist ideas with Islam’s practitioners, especially during the early years of our modernity when education was not so common among women, whether Hindu or Muslim.
Rokeya’s justly famous utopian fable Sultana’s Dream is now too well known for any kind of introduction here but her other satires are not so. Therefore, it is with joy and relief I came across a collection of her lesser-known satires and political writings published by Zubaan and translated by Kalyani Dutta.
Rokeya was born in a well-to-do family in undivided Bengal in 1880. Her early education at home was imparted through her elder siblings and when she was 18, she was married to Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hossain, who was educated in England and served as a deputy magistrate under the Raj. It was under her husband’s encouragement that she began to write in Bangla (as against Urdu or Persian) and soon published a number of works across various genres.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Freedom Fables
Zubaan, 2019
Her lifelong interest in women’s education and emancipation marks her to be one of the earliest and fiercest critics of Indian patriarchy during the nationalist eras. She founded the Anjuman-i-Khawateen-i-Islam (Islamic Women’s Association) that advocated social and educational reforms for Muslim women whose slow development, she believed, was the result of conservative patriarchal control under the guise of religion.
Her prolific writings on women’s rights were in Bangla rather than in Urdu because she wanted to reach out to a vast number of home-bound and purdah-bound women of Bengal. In this way, Rokeya contributed to linguistic modernity of the language that was at once polemical yet deeply personal in its aesthetic appeal.
It is important for us to understand that Rokeya’s fight for women’s rights was not just for Muslim women, but for all women, everywhere. Her impassioned arguments to recognise the strength and dignity of women, the value of their labour and her outright rejection of communal identification marks her out to be an important thinker, activist and writer whose exhortations have a special meaning today in our times. Therefore, the publication of Freedom Fables is both timely and of a deep political necessity.
The collection comprises of an excellent introduction by the translator that puts Rokeya in the context of literary ideas in early 20th-century Bangla public sphere. The biographical piece on Rokeya’s life and letters is again a valuable addition because she is almost virtually unknown outside Bengal. The translations are of varied non-fictions of Rokeya that deal with farmer distress, women’s rights, education and other topics.
In Gyanphal (The Tree of Knowledge) for instance, the writer underlines through the fable of Adam and Eve the double-edged power of knowledge. In the context of colonial modernity and Western episteme, the writer’s words resound with great irony: ‘Ignorance, which had made everything seem a dream of heavenly bliss, was now shattered. Sharp and keen was the awakening of knowledge. In place of enchantment and contentment, there was a feeling of consciousness and disquiet.’ (p. 69) Similarly, in Narir Odhikar (The Rights of Women) that Rokeya penned in 1932, she makes an impassioned plea for Muslim women’s rights in marriage.
“In our religion, a marriage is completed only after the bride and groom have both consented. If by mischance…it should come to divorce, it should happen by the consent of both. But why then, in practice, is divorce always one-sided, initiated only by the husband?….the husband abandons his wife on the smallest of pretexts.” (p.124)
It is interesting to see the writer’s deep reformist sensibilities in the context of Islam and the practice of talaq. Rokeya’s fierce criticism of orthodoxy is, however, tempered a little towards the last years of her life, particularly when she founded a school for girls belonging to conservative families and her own commitment to education for girls.
One of the most significant pieces in this collection is Chashar Dukku (The Peasant’s Sorrow, 1920), where the writer addresses the concerns and problems of contemporary agrarian crisis under the colonial rule. The short piece is remarkable not only for its subject matter but for its polemical yet passionate defence of peasant rights. Rokeya is not just content to lambast the ways in which the peasant in undivided Bengal had been systematically pauperised by their colonial masters but she also suggests a remedy:
“Fortunately, the distress in the countryside has attracted the attention of our patriotic leaders. But it is not enough for them to just observe. They have to make special efforts to reduce the suffering of the peasants. The only way to regain that ‘granary full of rice, Dacca muslin’ is to restore native industries – especially women’s industries.
In every district, jute cultivation should be reduced and instead cotton grown in large quantities. Also the promotion of the use of charkha and Endi yarn is desirable. If the women of Assam and Rongpur become active in cultivating Endi insects, the clothing problem of all of Bengal will be solved. Education must be spread in the villages. If there is a school in every village and charkhas and spindles in every home, the poverty of the peasants will end.”
The passion and intelligent assessments of these lines at once give Rokeya’s piece a grave singularity and solidly put her at par with many of Tagore’s ideas about village reconstruction that he experimented with at Sreeniketan. Even after so many years, these exhortations remain true as ever. This is both a source of deep disquiet and disillusionment among the agrarian communities of our nation.
Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, Indraprastha College For Women. Her translations of Tagore’s essays have appeared in The Essential Tagore (Harvard University Press) and she has edited, with Dilip Basu, The Home and the World(Worldview Publications).
