Sultana's Dream

Sultana's Dream is a 1905 work by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.

"Sultana's Dream" is one of the earliest feminist utopias published -- beating Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland by several years.

In this short story, an Indian woman visits, or perhaps dreams, of a world -- Ladyland -- in which purdah has been reversed, and women use science & technology to live peacefully and productively. Men are kept in purdah, and accordingly, crime has dropped.

Rokeya sagely notes -- at a time when English & American men were deluding themselves about the relationship between intelligence and the size of the brain -- that "An elephant also has got a bigger and heavier brain than a man has. Yet man can enchain elephants and employ them, according to his own wishes."

Rokeya also manages to get in a dig at men's inefficiency, and suggests that women can accomplish in two hours what men do in 7 or 8: "They [men] talk much about their work, but do little. Suppose one choroot takes half an hour to burn off, and a man smokes twelve choroots daily; then, you see, he wastes six hours every day in sheer smoking."

One last excellent observation: "A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests."

I'll close with this advice from Ladyland: "Only catch them [the men] and put them into the zenana."

Editions

• 1905, in The Indian Ladies Magazine, Madras, India
• 1908, S. K. Lahiri & Co., College Street, Calcutta, India
• 1973, in Rokeya Racanavali (Collected Works of Rokeya), edited by Abdul Quadir, The Bangla Academy, Dhaka, India;
• 1988, The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, New York, NY)

Notes, discussions

• Where Women Rule And Mirrors Are Weapons, Amardeep Singh, May 14, 2006