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.
Table of Content
Contents
Preface: Begum Rokeya by Akhtaruzzaman Elias
Foreword by Shahana Hanif
Artist’s Statement by Chitra Ganesh
Introduction: Spider-Mother by Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal
Translator’s Note
Sultana’s Dream
Fifty Miles in an Airplane (Dream Fulfilled)
Fruit of Knowledge
Burka
Woman-Prisoner
True Dawn
Acknowledgements
About the author
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 is working on a book titled Afrofutures, Atlantic Pasts: Decolonial Revisions in African American Science Fiction.
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