Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of her time, the effects of hauntingly pervasive systems of sexual domination, and collective dreams of the future, forging a visionary, experimental body of work. Alongside Rokeya’s pathbreaking feminist science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream,” this volume features fresh and exciting new translations of her key Bengali writings and a superbly informative introduction to her life and work. If her contemporary B. R. Ambedkar urged the “annihilation of caste,” Rokeya demands nothing less than the annihilation of sexism, with education as the primary instrument of this revolution. Her brilliant wit and creativity reflect profoundly on the complexities of undoing deep-seated gender supremacy and summon her readers to imagine hitherto undreamed freedoms.
ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN (1880–1932) was born in present-day Bangladesh, then part of colonial India. Despite being deprived of formal education, she became a prominent writer, activist, and educator. The web of her life spanned from the minutiae of running a girls’ school in Kolkata to struggles for women’s emancipation on the national and world stage.
BEN BAER is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University. He translated The Tale of Hansuli Turn by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay from Bengali. Baer’s most recent book is Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism.
SMARAN DAYAL is Assistant Professor of Literature at Stevens Institute of Technology. A scholar of American and postcolonial literature, Dayal is co-editor of Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts and and is working on a book titled Afrofutures, Atlantic Pasts: Decolonial Revisions in African American Science Fiction.
“In her groundbreaking work of science-fiction, ‘Sultana’s Dream,’ the pioneering Bengali writer, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, imagines a world where gender roles are reversed, and women hold leadership positions. With its emphasis on education, technological advancements, and the power of women’s leadership, Hossain’s work remains vitally relevant today. Kudos to Ben Baer for his fine translations of these important texts.”
—Amitav Ghosh, author, most recently, of Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
Pages: 150 pages
Book dimensions: 5.5 x .368 x 8.5 in
Pub date: October 21, 2024
ISBN 978-1-962572-98-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-962572-99-6 (e-book)
