Rokeya Day: Rokeya’s vision for women

The streets of Dhaka have been animated by women marching in protest and rage against rape and the continued violence against women. The demand for women's freedoms—of movement, of expression, of choice—have found a new radical vocabulary and expression.

It is at this moment that December 9, Rokeya Day, marking both the birth and death anniversary of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, acquires greater significance. Looking back at the life and works of this great woman, the beacon of the feminist movement in Bengal, enables us to trace the history and the contexts in which women have struggled, written, conjured up visions of new forms of living, and continue to inspire us.

Let us begin by situating Rokeya, or Begum Rokeya as she is popularly known, in her own context and times. It is well to remind ourselves of the changes that accrue through time—she spelt her name as Roquiah, which has been "Bengalised" into the later Rokeya or even Begum Rokeya. This change is emblematic of the changes in time, pronunciation but most crucially in the forms of address applied to Bengali Muslims and more specifically in our case, the Bengali Muslim woman.

Identifying Rokeya as a Bengali Muslim woman draws attention not only to the time and place in which she was writing, that is early twentieth century Bengal, but also to the many factors that combine to create national and communal identity, with repercussions on how gender is conceived and gender identities formed. A spate of Muslim-edited journals made their appearance in that period, such as Mohammedi or Nabanoor, or the later Saugat. Making their debut in the first decades of the twentieth century, these journals were engaged in delineating a place for the Bengali Muslim in the anti-colonial struggles, and in the independent nations being imagined. The hotly-contested first partition of Bengal had taken place, the Muslim League had just been formed, and the creation of Dhaka as a capital of the new province had created new centres of administration and was soon to see a new university. It is in this context that the flurry of intellectual activity and publication, mainly centred in Kolkata, but with smaller publications in Dhaka and the other cities of East Bengal, started to appear. This period and these activities marked the entry of the Bengali Muslim into the mainstream national and intellectual debates.

One of the most striking features of this efflorescence of writing was the call to women writers. The editorial of the first edition of Nabanoor called to women to come out of the antahpur or the inner quarters and to grace the pages of the journal just as they graced the homes. And one of the first writers to respond to this call was Rokeya, whose 1906 article Strijatir Abanati, later edited into Amader Abanati, can be seen as a clarion call to all of us. Crucially, her call and address is not to Muslim women alone, but to all women, and she asks them to cast off the trappings of the patriarchy and to fulfil their duties as individuals. She says that God will call on all human beings to justify their existence on earth, and how will the women answer? This depiction of women as autonomous and sovereign, as responsible for themselves, is indeed striking, and the couching of it in religious imagery, gives it a potency and an appeal that goes beyond sectarian divides.

Therein perhaps lies Rokeya's greatness: her ability to situate herself in the social and political realities, but to transcend them in her vision for a new and brighter future for women. It is this vision that propelled her through her life, in her writings, in her social activism and in the school for girls that she established in Kolkata. She imagines women as "judges and barristers", she draws examples from Turkey and Egypt, from the Parsi women in Bombay, to acquaint her readers with the larger world they inhabit. The contrast is with the denizens of Aborodh Bashini who are not allowed to raise their eyes to see beyond the walls of their houses.

Rokeya's literary style has often been commented on, from her use of satire to the rhetorical devices she uses to criticise and inspire. Her use of language is indeed remarkable. Writing in Bangla could not have come easily to her, having been schooled in Quranic Arabic and the Urdu of the upper-class, aristocratic or ashraf Bengali at home. The Bangla that she had gleaned from her brother is polished and taken to another level, making her a wonderful example of the language and identity debate of the period. The Bengali Muslim writer was making a place for him/herself in the literary sphere of Bangla writing. Hitherto, the language of the Bengali Muslim had been sidelined by communal and class considerations. The Muslim gentry in Bengal spoke and perhaps wrote in Urdu, failing to place itself in the Sanskritised literary language that had emerged during the mid-nineteenth century Bengal Renaissance. The atraf or the Muslim peasantry spoke and wrote in dialects that were not part of this literary scene, and the older (and still popular) language of punthis were hardly recognised by the literary establishment. The pages of the journals under consideration were involved in a lively debate about language and the place of the Muslim writer. Rokeya enters this scene, writing confidently and unhesitatingly in clear and crisp Bangla prose. Her ability to transcend sectarian divides also gives her this ease and comfort with language.

And perhaps this ease is nowhere more visible than in Sultana's Dream (1905). Written originally in English, this is perhaps one of the earliest examples of a woman writing in English from our region. The subject matter of this short story continues to amaze us. It is read as a feminist utopia, where women rule, where scientific rationality reigns, where work and leisure are perfectly balanced. Gender roles are overturned, men are kept in the murdana, making the streets perfectly safe for women, where women are not taught to be demure and shy, but to be bold and confident, and peace and happiness reign supreme.

So right at the beginning of the last century, when the lineaments of the new nation(s) in the making were being laid down, Rokeya gave us a vision of freedom, of a world that is free of strife and conflict, where lives are ordered and cater to every need, where scientific innovations such as the harnessing of solar energy gives us a clean environment, and that is ruled by women. This vision of a just and compassionate society has continued to inspire us for over a hundred years.

Written in English as it was, it found publication in a women's journal in Madras, opening her readership beyond the borders of Bengal. My attention has been drawn to an anthology of science fiction published in Sweden a couple of years back, the first story of which is Sultana's Dream.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain stands as a beacon for the feminist struggle, for the struggle against injustice, and as we hold up the torch today, it is wonderful to have such an inspiring foremother to turn to.

Prof Firdous Azim teaches at Brac University and is a member of Naripokkho.