• 1 Rokeya Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream”, in Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia, trans. by Roushan Jahan, (...)

1“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. But as far as I remember, I was wide awake.”1 So begins one of the best-known novellas from South Asia, Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). Hossain’s story takes us and her narrator, Sultana, to a world called “Ladyland”, a place Sultana finds both familiar (she mistakenly thinks she is being guided by her friend Sara) and strange (there are no men anywhere and women roam freely). The shift to dreaming is preceded by the narrator’s comment that she was thinking about “the condition of Indian womanhood”, and in so thinking rather than being prompted to write, she begins to dream. In Sultana’s dream, a wholly different kind of world is conjured up: a world without war, or environmental degradation, or patriarchal oppression. Ladyland is a (future) world whose contours refute the very premises that constitute the present “condition of Indian womanhood”.

• 2 Roushan Jahan, Inside Seclusion: The avarodhbasini of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Dacca, Women for Wom (...)
• 3 See, for instance: Shaheen Akhtar and Moushumi Bhowmick (eds), Women in Concert: An anthology of Be (...)
• 4 See, Mohammad A. Quayum, “Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: A Biographical Essay”, in Mohammad A. Quayum and (...)

2Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), the remarkable writer of Sultana’s Dream, is anomalous among early twentieth -century Muslim women writers in being claimed as both a national figure in Bangladesh (where December 9^th is celebrated as Begum Rokeya Day) and a global figure by international feminists. The first full anthology of Rokeya’s work was published in 1973 by Abdul Qader for the Bangla Academy. But it was not until 1981 that Roushan Jahan edited and translated into English a text titled Inside Seclusion, which included a translation of Rokeya’s 1931 Avarodhbashini (The Secluded Ones) and Sultana’s Dream.2 Jahan’s book was subsequently republished by the the Feminist Press in 1988 but it was not until the 2000s that Sultana’s Dream began to regularly appear in Western published anthologies. What is most striking is the range of anthologies into which this particular novella could be slotted: anthologies of women’s writings; anthologies on women’s political thought; anthologies of gender and science fiction; anthologies on utopias, etc. Rokeya Hossain’s early 20^th-century concerns as articulated in Sultana’s Dream, concerns about ecological degradation, feminist empowerment, and the power of technology, have had a particular resonance for the early 21^st- century. This has meant, in part, that unlike the majority of twentieth -century Muslim women writers from South Asia, Rokeya Hossain herself has become the subject of multiple Bengali and English language studies.3 Most of this scholarship has focused on the content of Rokeya’s various essays—her critique of gender norms and her demand for women’s education. Her essays have been compared with Mary Wollstonecraft’s (in tone and content) and her fiction with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (specifically Gilman’s Herland).4

• 5 For the history of Muslim women’s education in South Asia, see, Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Wo (...)

3Yet the focus on the explicitly feminist content of her essays, novellas, and short stories, has had an unintended effect—her work is analyzed almost wholly through the framework of religious, social, and gender reform. For instance, a recent set of critical essays on Rokeya details her writings on education, her explicit challenges to patriarchy, her notions of enlightened religion, and her nascent environmental critique. But there is little attention to her style of writing or the hybrid genres with which she experimented. Rokeya’s writing is primarily understood through her educational, religious and social reform initiatives—hardly surprising, since she is celebrated for founding one of the first schools for Muslim girls, in 1911 in Kolkata.5

• 6 Sonia Amin, “Rokeya (Roquiah) Sakhawat Hossein”, in Najma Chowdhury (ed.), Protesting Patriarchy: C (...)
• 7 Toni Morrison, quoted in Namwali Serpell, “On Black Difficulty: Toni Morrison and the thrill of imp (...)

5In an early essay on Rokeya Hossain, Sonia Amin, suggests this when she notes, “as a writer, Rokeya could afford to be what she could not be as social reformer-viz, more open, untrammeled and honest”.6 In using the word ’untrammeled’, Amin centers the idea (defined negatively) that writing was a space in which Rokeya was not deprived of the freedom to act or express herself. I would take Amin’s observation further and argue that for Rokeya, writing was more closely aligned with ideas of freedom rather than ideas of uplift, improvement, or service to the nation. Or, as Toni Morrison succinctly noted: “All of my life is doing something for somebody else . . . The only thing I do for me is writing. That’s really the real free place where I don’t have to answer”.7

• 8 Helene Cixous, Three steps on the Ladder of Writing, in Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (translated (...)

8One way to understand the relationship between dreaming and writing in Rokeya’s work is through the work of the French feminist theorist, Helen Cixous. Cixous observes that dreaming, like writing, is a threshold state in which the reader or dreamer suddenly finds herself “on the other side”. without any real transition. She likens it to a form of travel: “there is no passport, no visa but this extreme familiarity with extreme strangeness”.8 Cixous points us to the puzzle presented by the dream and the text—our experience of both simultaneously elicits a sense of recognition and estrangement. Rokeya’s narrators routinely comment on this familiarity and strangeness, a feeling that then prompts them to repeatedly question whether they are dreaming or awake. In fact her narrator’s disorientation becomes central to the critique mounted in the text itself where we are asked to look anew at “familiar” gender and social norms.

• 9 Kelly Bulkeley, “Reflections on the Dream Traditions of Islam”, Sleep and Hypnosis, vol. 4, n°1, 20 (...)
• 10 Anira Mittermaier, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivity beyond the trope of self-actualizati (...)
• 11 See Amalia Dragani, “The Past of Dreams: Gender, Memory and Tuareg Oneirical Inspiration,” Africa, (...)

9Another entry point into the waking dream is through the ideas about dreaming within the Islamic tradition. Beginning with the first revelatory visions of Muhammad9 and continuing to the present, dreams and dream interpretation constitute an important mode of Muslim religious practice. This is especially true for those dreams that “come to the dreamer as opposed to being produced by him or her,”10 that are effectively revelations. In certain Sufi traditions, dreams are the conduits through which individuals receive guidance and knowledge. While there is criticism directed at popular forms of dream interpretation, there seems to be significant theological precedent in the Quran, the Hadith, and later Sufi texts for divinely inspired dreams and visions. In fact, there are theories about ways to invite such revelatory dreams, including prayer, fasting, and certain sleeping postures (sleeping on the right side).11

• 12 Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar and a very holy period. The tenth day of Muharr (...)

10The place of dreams in Muslim belief is especially useful in guiding our reading of Rokeya’s first evocation of the waking dream in her essay “Pipasha” (Thirst), published in 1902 in the journal Nabaprabha and later republished in the Muharram issue of the journal Dhumketu12 “Pipasha” retells the familiar story, through the genre of the waking dream, of the seventh -century battle of Karbala between the Ummayad caliph Yezid and Husayn Ibn Ali. While it adheres to a number of aspects of the Muharram ritual, Rokeya’s essay also creates the space for a woman (and this case a woman writer) to adopt both a ritually-sanctioned religious voice and an authorial voice.

• 13 Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, New Delhi, Kali for Women, 1999, p. 5.

15Rokeya’s memory of this episode was related in a much later essay called “50 Miles in an Airplane” (which details her first experience of flight in 1933). The story introduces important overlapping themes common to stories of women’s literacy in colonial India: the importance of family encouragement (natal and then married) and a natural inclination towards writing. But it also threatens to obscure the complexity of writing that is revealed in Rokeya’s other work by eliding literacy with composition and aligning Rokeya’s experience of the world (as unfair, as unkind, as patriarchal) and the creation of a satirical story of (as her husband remarked) of “revenge”. The story recounts a place called Ladyland (dreamt by Sultana) in which men, rather than women, are kept in seclusion. The seclusion of men in the “mardana” (an inverse of women’s seclusion in the zenana) allows women to create, govern, and sustain a world in which science, peace, rationality, and rule. In fact, the fictional creation of such a women-run utopia (Ladyland) might be seen by many readers as the result of “posit[ing] a straight connection between female subjectivity and female writing, to assume that the latter reflects the former in some direct, unmediated way”.13

• 14 The word achar in Bangla carries the same dual meaning that the word “mark” does in English. That i (...)

16Yet even as Rokeya describes her composition process as “passing time” while her husband is away, the next few lines reveal her acute awareness of potential readers/editors. She notes that when her husband sent the piece to the Deputy Commissioner Macintosh, he returned it without ever having “made a mark in pen anywhere”.14 The word “mark” in Bengali (achar) carries a similar connotation as in English—it refers to both a line or symbol and the (implied) violence of a stain or blemish on something. Here, I see Rokeya purposely referencing both notions—the pride that the Deputy Commissioner did not mark her work and the relief at escaping the violence that such a marking might entail. By the time Rokeya published this essay, her texts had become increasingly marked—singled out for their putatively blasphemous content and ruthlessly edited so that any ostensibly insulting material was purged.

• 15 One of the first appearances of non-fiction prose essays in Bengali was in Samachar Darpan, a newsp (...)

18While Bengali language journals published many literary pieces (short stories, poetry, etc.), the genre most often taken up when agitating for reform or change was the essay. The vernacular essay form was relatively new, in part because a prose form of the written Bengali language was itself a late linguistic development. The expansion of prose (and the development of a proseform of Bengali itself) was directly connected to the imperials needs of the British East India Company, to evangelical interest in translation and didactic publication, and to the social reform efforts of native intellectuals like Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833).15 Thus from its inception, reform was the primary impetus and frame for the act of essay writing, reflecting the colonial context from which the ostensibly Western, bourgeois form emerged. In fact, the popularity of the essay might itself be traced to missionary essay contests, later picked up by other groups, which only further narrowed the Bengali essay as primarily a means to defend or attack various forms of religious or social practices.

• 16 Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal, Delhi, Oxford (...)

19By the early twentieth century, the expansion of the vernacular press became especially important for the articulation of a distinctly Bengali Muslim voice, what one scholar has described as “a new period in the social and political history of Bengal Muslims”.16 Muslim Bengali writers challenged the dominance of both the Urdu-language press and the Hindu-dominated Bengali public sphere. Bengali Muslim publications reflected the range of their political positions, from the politically conservative to the radically progressive. Some of the most progressive journals headed by Muslim editors, including Nabanoor and Saogat, were instrumental in publishing and publicizing the work of women writers including Rokeya Hossain.

• 17 Quoted in Firdous Azim and Perween Hasan, “Constructions of Gender in the Late Nineteenth and Early (...)
• 18 Sarkar, Words to Win, op. cit., p 7.

20For instance, a “call for papers” put out by the journal Nabanoor (literally “New Light”) encourages women to “participate in our literary activities and contribute to the glow of Nabanoor”.17 In spite of entrenched religious prohibitions against women’s literacy in many communities, the Nabanoor call reflects a counter-effort (albeit far smaller) to encourage women readers to write. Unlike in Western Europe, the fairly late development of a prose form of Bengali meant that “women did not start writing too long after men had done so”.18 Yet even in the most progressive circles, the purpose of women’s writing was restricted in both subject matter and genre.

• 19 When Rokeya made such a claim very early on in one of her most famous essays (“The Degradation of W (...)
• 20 An exception to this are the 20^th century Lucknowi Urdu poets studied by Amy Bard who “appear to em (...)

24Rokeya’s choice to write on Muharram is not accidental—the meaning of the ritual, and more importantly, its gendered nature is crucial in understanding how she begins to make space for herself as a thinker and writer. Her essay does this, in part, by transforming from a secular expository text into a ritual text for a ritual that already has an acceptable space for women’s agency: the female orator in a majalis ceremony. This ritual space is important to note because while it may have been somewhat acceptable for a woman to “reform” certain social conventions, there was no space in twentieth- century South Asia (or in present day South Asia for that matter) for a woman to claim the authority to interpret religious texts themselves.19 While there were majalis led by women orators, most of the poems recited at the gatherings, the marsiya or elegiac poems of martyrdom, were composed by men.20 But the poetry composed by these women poets was generally known through recitation rather than through print.

• 21 One of the earliest (and most influential) elegies about the martyrdom in Karbala is Shah Garibulla (...)
• 22 Epsita Halder, “Reading the Cheapness of Print: Karbala Narratives in Early Print Culture”, Compara (...)
• 23 As a literary text, Bishad Sindhu is unique in that it is a prose text concerning a ritually signif (...)
• 24 See Mou Banerjee, “The Tale of the Tailor: Munshi Mohammad Meherullah and Muslim- Christian Apologe (...)

25The Muharram literary tradition in North India was primarily poetic, but in Bengal the compositions inspired by Muharram were varied and multiple21. Epshita Halder notes that Karbala, as a theme, “oscillated between religiosity and narrative, scripture and ritual, history of the community and imagined story”.22 The best known literary example of Muharram’s place in Bengali culture is Mir Mosharraf Hossein’s 1884 text, Bishad Sindhu (“The Sea of Sorrows”).23 Although a novel, in Bengal, Bishad Sindhu took on the aura of a ritual text—in some Bengali households, the book’s religious importance was evidenced by its being placed alongside the Qur’an.24

• 25 “Pipasha”, Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 14.

27“Pipasha” initially appears to be a reformist exhortation against the excesses of religious ritual—in this case, the critique of the overly exuberant public observation of Muharram. Muharram is a ritual in which multiple religious communities in South Asia—Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Hindus, etc.—participate. Watching the Muharram processions (the julus) with the tazia (the replica of the tomb of Hussain carried in the process), the drums, the banners, etc., the narrator asks, “doesn’t this spectacle bring to mind the memory of ancient grief . . . can’t we see what is clearly written on the banner, ‘Pipasha, Pipasha (Thirst, Thirst)’”.25 “Pipasha” articulates a tension inherent in the ways in which Muharram is observed—a ritual that is meant to honor the martyrdom of those at Karbala is celebrated by an overly joyous public (male) procession through the streets.

• 26 Mary Hegland, “The power paradox in Muslim women’s Majales: North-west Pakistani mourning rituals a (...)

30Rokeya’s decision to write on the Muharram ritual has importance for the question of women and writing in a more oblique way as well. Specifically the authority the narrator is able to command in “Pipasha”, as a religious participant and as an interpreter of religious tradition, has precedence in the authority assumed by female orators at a women’s majalis. At a majalis during Muharram, a woman orator will guide her fellow worshippers through a retelling of certain scenes from Karbala to prompt them to remember and mourn the deaths of Imam Hussain and his family. The women’s majalis thus offers a customarily sanctioned space for women to lead and interpret religious teachings. Mary Hegland, in a wonderful ethnography of women’s majales in Pakistan, calls the tradition of women-led mourning rituals “feminine ritual-shaped freedoms”.26 My argument here is not so much about Rokeya’s actual participation in a Muharram majalis, but rather that there was already a “feminine” space created in the Muharram rituals that encouraged the kind of religious interpretation and self-reflection mounted by the narrator in “Pipasha”.

• 27 The recitation of the marsiya is an act of piety and should never be reducible to mere performance. (...)

31While the waking dream or trance is one of the means by which an orator in a majalis might evoke Karbala, here I argue that this also becomes the mode (as much as the metaphor) for how Rokeya begins to conceive the act of writing. In this, she explicitly disavows the notion of writing as only an act of reason and consciousness. The frame of the waking dream allows the narrator to remember the experience of something she has not (historically) experienced—the battle at Karbala. But the skill of the narrator (like that of a skilled marsiya reciter) is her ability to evoke the tragedy of Karbala and the emotions of loss and grief in her fellow mourners without appearing as though she is acting.27

• 28 “Pipasha”; Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 14.

32Both imagination and empathy are critical to the evocation of grief and loss that is a part of the Muharram mourning ritual in ways that suggest some parallel with the creative work of writing. Rather than seeing writing and composition as the highly rational process of argumentation and persuasion (the model of the masculinist essay), the impulse to write might be seen as closer to the dream state between waking and sleeping. The dream/memory of Muharram is significant for both evoking the appropriate religious orientation (mourning rather than celebration) and the force that the dream exerts even after waking. While it initially appears the narrator is simply remembering a dream she had, her awakening suggests that she was in fact dreaming for the length of the essay. “Now the dream is no longer—I have awoken. In the distance, I hear the jackal’s shrill cry, ‘pipasha, pipasha’ (thirst, thirst)! What’s this, have I gone mad? Why do I only see ‘pipasha’? Why do I only hear ‘pipasha’?”28 The narrator’s lingering sense of still being in a dream—the call of “pipasha” everywhere—reawakens a personal memory of the loss of a child that echoes the death of the infant Ali.

• 29 Hossain, Sultana’s Dream, op. cit., p. 7.
• 30 See Parna Sengupta, “The worship of taste: Rokeya Hossain and the politics of ritual fasting”, in U (...)

34As Cixous noted, dreams mix elements of the familiar and strange and so they are an ideal framework for utopian imaginings which are similarly familiar and strange. This is indicated in the very beginning of the text when Sultana (not knowing if she is awake or asleep) is greeted by a woman who comes into her bedroom: “I took her for my friend, Sister Sara. ‘Good morning’, said Sister Sara. I smiled inwardly as I knew it was not morning, but starry night”.29 Here is our first clue about the upside down world in which Sultana finds herself—where day is night; where women govern and men are kept in seclusion; where there is no war and no pollution. Sultana’s Dream has been the subject of numerous scholarly articles and reinterpreted into other forms (including a play and an illustrated version by Gond artist Durga Bai). “Ladyland”, where Sultana finds herself, is a place where men are kept in the satirically named mardana (male-seclusion—the obverse of zenana) and women govern. The absence of men ensures that there is no war, no crime, no violence, and women can focus on environmental sustainability and the expansion of knowledge. In “Ladyland”, gender binaries still shape how the world is understood. However, what constitutes being “mannish” (the word Rokeya uses) is not simply a reversal of roles. For instance, there is a great emphasis put on science, aesthetics (gardens, embroidery, etc.), and scientific cooking as the domain of women.30 While war is considered a part of the moral world of men, Universities and knowledge production expand only under the leadership of women.

• 31 Hossain, Sultana’s Dream, op. cit., p. 15.

35Most importantly, even in the midst of a utopian dream world, Sultana is told that this is already possible in her world and that she has a responsibility to convey this when she returns (awakens). She tells Sara (her friend/not-friend), “my friends at home will be amused and amazed, when I go back and tell them that in the far-off Ladyland, ladies rule over the country and control all social matters, while gentlemen are kept in the mardanas”. To which Sara replies, “Yes, tell them about all that you see here”.31 Thus even as the frame of the dream frees Rokeya to conjure a fantastical world, she nonetheless retains some of sense of the responsibility she owes her society to tell them of a world that is differently ordered, a responsibility that even her dream partner, Sara, demands.

• 32 Jacques Derrida and Lawrence Venuti, “What is Relevant Translation?” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 27, (...)

38In almost all of her translated texts, Rokeya uses the same phrase to describe her effort: “I could not resist the desire to give the gift of this (text) in Bangla.” The phrase, in which desire might also be translated as a kind of calling, aligns with Derrida’s description of “a summons to translation at the very threshold of all reading-writing”.32 For the reader, the translated text is a gift, bringing news and stories and ideas from elsewhere. For the writer, translation can be a moment of great constraint, but also of great freedom.

• 33 “Nari Shristi”, in Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 189.

40For instance, in the satirical piece “Nari Shrishti” (The Creation of Women), the narrator begins by noting that the text is a translation of a story by F.W. Bain, but warns: “Let me caution that I will not translate the story verbatim like a school girl, but only provide the essence of it. Therefore, no one should be disappointed or upset by the disparity in the translation and the original”.33 (C of W). This comment foregrounds the possibilities of translation as engendering creativity and interpretation, rather than an act of submission. That is, the narrator insists on her own authority (as a writer) to resist the expectations and judgment of others who would judge her. Translating for a teacher’s approval is constraining not only because it robs the writer of her imagination but it also produces a text that is merely a technical rendering of the words of text A to text B. Verbatim translation is infantilizing (literally), a regurgitation of a school lesson rather than the creative interpretive work done by a woman writer-translator. For Rokeya the freedom to translate as she wants is to assert her authority as both a reader and a writer—for in providing the “essence”, of the original text, she draws attention to the centrality of interpretation inherent in any good translation.

• 34 Prasenjit Gupta, “Post-or Neo-Colonial Translation? Linguistic Inequality and Translators Resistanc (...)

41In eschewing verbatim translation, Rokeya reminds us of the creative and aesthetic choices that constitute the rendering of one text into another language, effectively blurring the distinction between translation and writing. Prasenjit Gupta reminds us that literary translation is “inherently a creative act, with conscious choices and subconscious inspirations, as demanding and unpredictable in some ways as creating ‘new’ works”.34 Gupta’s observations help illuminate the unexpected ways that Rokeya decided to translate F.W. Bain’s original story (itself a fictive translation of a Puranic tale). Rokeya’s initial framing of the translation, and its subsequent unfolding reflect the “conscious and subconscious” nature of translating and, as we shall see, connect it to the “waking dream” that for her constitutes the act of composition and creativity.

• 35 “Nari Shristi”, Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 190.

43Initially, Rokeya’s translation of Bain’s story appears to be relatively straightforward, but mid-way through the narrator inserts herself into the text: “At this point in the translation, I felt tired and held the pen in my right hand and leaned my head on my left hand resting on the table. I am not sure if I had fallen asleep”.35 The detailed description, of holding the pen in the right hand and leaning one’s head on one’s left hand, powerfully conjures up for the reader the image of the woman writer at work. Even as the writer is unsure of whether she has lost consciousness or not, we are acutely aware of her presence in the production of the text that we are reading, perhaps similarly drowsy and dreaming.

• 36 “Nari Shriti”, Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 59.

44From this point forward the text goes in a wholly unexpected direction. The room has been lit-up because the Hindu god Tvashtri (sometimes identified with Vishwakarma—the god of craftsmen and engineers), has decided to reveal himself to the writer. Tvashtri demands that she function as his scribe and take his words down exactly. The narrator is told by Tvashtri that “Mr. Bain forgot to mention twelve of the ingredients while translating the story from Sanskrit to English, and I have come to rectify that mistake today”. Tvashtri then proceeds to rattle off a recipe that, it is soon clear, are “the ingredients for chutney”. The narrator points this out to Tvashtri, but he refuses to listen, disciplining her for her insolence and demanding that she return to transcribing. At this point, the narrator again breaks off the narrative to note, “this interruption [break] in the story will anger my female readers. But tell me what can I do? It’s difficult to have freedom [shadhinatha] while translating another’s work . . . you have to curb one’s imagination [kalpana]”.36

• 37 “Shristi Tattva”, in Qadir (ed), Rokeya Rachanabali, op. cit., p. 244.

47At this liminal moment—between being awake and being asleep—Tvashtri appears and explains his presence in the following manner: “You have created a commotion by translating my history of the creation of woman into Bengali. But I shouldn’t blame you, part of the fault lies with the Saogat magazine office . . . The editor was away at that time . . . [it was published] leaving out two footnotes”.37 We might ask, at this point, who is Tvashtri, this omniscient being who demands complete (literary) obedience from the narrator. Perhaps he is an editor? Or an (equally) demanding reader? We feel for this narrator, who struggles to be understood, or at least not misunderstood. Yet all her efforts are stymied by problems of publication and readership. That is, these two stories that mock religious interpretations of creation are also stories about the conditions under which writers, like Rokeya, worked. Rokeya’s two satirical stories skewer not only religion (which was their ostensible purpose), but draw explicit attention to the conditions faced by women who chose to write. Rokeya’s narrators draw attention to the solitude required for writing (when others have gone to bed), a solitude that also invites dreaming. Sultana is able to dream a new world when she is relaxing in her bedroom (and Rokeya was able to write this only when her husband was away for work).

• 38 For a discussion of Sakhawat Memorial School specifically, see Sarmishta Datta Gupta, “From Sakhawa (...)

48We are accustomed to recounting the challenges faced by Rokeya (and others) in their efforts at social or religious reform, for example, the opposition she encountered when she opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School, a school for Bengali Muslim girls in Calcutta in 1911 (the school continues to function today).38 The persistent frustration Rokeya faced as a writer, as reflected in “Nari Shrishti” and “Shristi Tattha”, was the continual need for her to compromise her freedom and imagination to serve the interests of a reading public still unused to the woman writer.

• 39 “Introduction” in Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar (eds.), Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A (...)

49In Sumit and Tanika Sarkar’s introduction to Women and Social Reform in Modern India, they tell us that the early twentieth century introduced India to “a new social category that was a crucial sign of modern times: that of the woman writer”.39 Rokeya Hossain was very much an example of this “new social category”—a woman writer who was able to get published and find an audience for her work. In spite of this seeming success, Rokeya was far less sanguine about the space society actually afforded the woman writer. While “social reform” might be an acceptable space in which women were allowed to comment, making space for the woman writer was an altogether different matter.

• 40 Ibid., p. 158.

50In spite of the stigma faced by women writers, Rokeya felt writing offered women something unique. In her Bengali-language translation of the English writer Marie Corelli’s novel The Murder of Delicia (Delicia Hatya), 1922, Rokeya considers why the eponymous character would continue to earn her living as a novelist in spite of the social opprobrium and personal attacks that her choice of profession seemed to generate. “How many unknown ladies come and go (live and die) in this world, but the title granthakatri Delicia will be immortal”.40 The “title” of being a female writer offers immortality because published work lives on long after the individual woman has come and gone. This is the real cruelty of patriarchal social norms—they only give access to this immortality to certain men whose ideas can continue to exert influence, in religious interpretation or in cultural forms, long after they are gone.