Archive for the ‘Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain’ Category
I discovered this wonderful short story in The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. I did some research on the author, and learned about her incredible legacy. Read the story because it’s fun, learn about Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein (also known as Begum Rokheya) because she’s freaking amazing.
One of the many wonderful things about fiction that’s older than 100 years old, is that you can often read it for free, online. If a fifty pound anthology isn’t for you, you can read “Sultana’s Dream” at Strange Horizons, where they reprinted the story as part of a series on Utopias.
Because all science fiction (and a lot of art) is a reaction and reflection of the time in which it was written, here are a few contextual things you might want to know before you read “Sultana’s Dream”.
- Begum Rokheya was born in 1880, in what is now known as Bangladesh, and at the time was British India
- She is considered the pioneer feminist of Bengal
- She was raised in an intellectual, multi-lingual home that was wealthy but also very traditional. This combination meant that she learned Arabic and Urdu, and then English and Bengali.
- You may want to understand what purdah is. (or not. up to you)
Reading this story sent me down a google rabbit hole of the phrase “gender-flip”. That term has to be fairly new, right? hahahaha, NO. I love that gender-flipping has been having a moment for the last, oh, 20 years, but the concept has been around for quite a while. My brain is also going down the rabbit hole of “what was social media way back when?” more on that at the end of this post.
“Sultana’s Dream” plays with gender flipping (and women’s rights!), with the idea that in this Indian Utopia, the women run the country and the men are kept in seclusion.
The plot goes like this: Sultana is drowsing away the afternoon, when a woman walks into her room and invites her out for a walk. Sultana at first thinks the woman is her friend Sister Sara, but later realizes the woman is a stranger. Upon leaving Sultana’s home, they end up where not-Sister Sara lives, and Sultana states that she feels weird walking around in public unveiled, as she is a purdahnishin.
The rest of the story is not-Sister Sara explaining to Sultana how her women-run world, called Ladyland, came to be. A young Queen insisted that all women in the country have access to education, thus women’s universities were started. The women’s universities used their discoveries and inventions for the good of the whole community, while the men stayed focused on military might. The men insisted that the inventions that came out of the women’s university’s were nice, but nothing compared to the value or importance of military strength and other men’s work.
When the country finds themselves on the losing side of a war, the Queen and her female advisors come up with a plan, which I won’t spoil. They win the war, and in the process transform the country into one where women can be in public unveiled, and the men are kept in seclusion. When the men ask to be let out of seclusion, the Queen’s response is “if their services should ever be needed, they would be sent for, and that in the meanwhile they would remain where they were”.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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