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Tells the story of a feminist utopia and discusses the Muslim custom of purdah, the seclusion and segregation of women.
In Visible Histories, Disappearing Women, Mahua Sarkar examines how Muslim women in colonial Bengal came to be more marginalized than Hindu women in nationalist discourse and subsequent historical accounts. She also considers how their near-invisibility except as victims has underpinned the construction of the ideal citizen-subject in late colonial India. Through critical engagements with significant feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Sarkar maps out when and where Muslim women enter into the written history of colonial Bengal. She argues that the nation-centeredness of history as a discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together contributed to the production o...
In The Essential Rokeya, Mohammad A. Quayum brings together, for the first time, some of the best work by one of South Asia’s earliest and most heroic feminist writers and activists, who was also a leading figure of the Bengal Renaissance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). This collection includes Rokeya’s most popular story, Sultana’s Dream, and some essays and letters written originally in English, as well as Quayum’s own translation of several of her fiction and non-fiction works written originally in Bengali. This will enable readers outside Bangladesh and West Bengal to appraise and appreciate Rokeya’s fundamental role in the feminist awakening in South Asia, especially among the Bengali Muslims of her time.
Sultana's Dream is a classic work of Bengali science fiction and one of the first examples of feminist science fiction. This short story was written in 1905 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Muslim feminist, writer and social reformer who lived in British India, in what is now Bangladesh. The word sultana here means a female sultan, a Muslim ruler.Sultana's Dream was originally published in English in The Indian Ladies Magazine of Madras (1905), and is considered part of Bengali literature. It depicts a feminist utopia in which women run everything and men are secluded, in a mirror-image of the traditional practice of purdah. The women are aided by technology which enables laborless farming and flying cars; the female scientists have discovered how to use solar power and control the weather. Crime is eliminated, since men were 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.
In a compelling study of Indian women, Geraldine Forbes considers their recent history from the nineteenth century under colonial rule to the twentieth century after Independence. She begins with the reform movement, established by men to educate women, and demonstrates how education changed women's lives enabling them to take part in public life. Through their own accounts of their lives and activities, she documents the formation of their organisations, their participation in the struggle for freedom, their role in the colonial economy and the development of the women's movement in India since 1947.
Offers an annotated source for the study of the public and private lives of South Asian Muslim women.
"A Study Guide for Begum Rokeya's ""Sultana's Dream"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs."
TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).
From Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), the writer of the feminist utopian fantasy ‘Sultana’s Dream’, come these tales of gumptious wit, describing the twists and turns of India’s two-hundred-year relationship with the imperial British. Freedom Fables begins with the two eponymous fables, both compact in form but temporally vast. The first story ‘Muktiphal’ (translated in this volume as ‘The Freedom Tree’) traces the rise of and divisions within India’s Congress party. ‘Gyanphal’ or ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, the second fable, begins in the Garden of Eden and moves swiftly to an idealised Kanakadwipa where a trading company beguiles the prosperous country and procee...