Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Sultana's Dream Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Sultana's Dream is a 1905 feminist utopian story written by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Muslim feminist, writer and social reformer from Bengal. It was published in the same year in Madras based English periodical The Indian Ladies Magazine. It depicts a feminist utopia (called Ladyland) in which women run everything and men are secluded, in a mirror-image of the traditional practice of purdah. The women are aided by science fiction-esque "electrical" technology which enables laborless farming and flying cars; the women scientists have discovered how to trap solar power and control the weather. This results in "a sort of gender-based Planet of the Apes where the roles are reversed and the men are locked away in a technologically advanced future."There, traditional stereotypes such as "Men have bigger brains" and women are "naturally weak" are countered with logic such as "an elephant also has a bigger and heavier brain" and "a lion is stronger than a man" and yet neither of them dominates men. In Ladyland crime is eliminated, since men were considered responsible for all of it. The workday is only two hours long, since men used to waste six hours of each day in smoking. The religion is one of love and truth. Purity is held above all, such that the list of "sacred relations" (mahram) is widely extended.