In 1905, the year of the partition of Bengal, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published “The Dream of Sultana”, a parable about a utopian society called Ladyland, a land without devout conflicts, wars, bloodshed, crime, poverty or even mosquito bites, where all men live apart in the mardanas and the society led by women. Science and generation in a responsible and ethical manner. Hossain’s tale made an impression in Indian Ladies’ Magazine, published in Madras (now Chennai), the first English-language magazine for Indian women and one of the first to be edited by a woman.
Roquiah Khatun, or Mrs. R. S. Hossein, as she called her English call (popularly known today as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, or Begum Rokeya), born in 1880 into a circle of informed and hard-working Jomidar relatives in the village of Pairaband in Rangpur, East Bengal, in present-day Bangladesh. His father, like other scholars of the landowning elite of his time, had studied Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. He had 4 wives, one of whom had no sons and one European, and a total of nine sons and six daughters. Begum Rokeya’s mother, Rahatunnesa Sabera Chaudhurani, his first wife.
Rokeya’s brothers were well informed locally and were then sent to the University of Calcutta, 300 miles away but connected to Rangpur by rail. Abul Asad Ibrahim Saber, his older brother, attended Saint Xavier’s College in Kolkata, where he learned the concepts and activism of Syed Ahmed Khan and Syed Ameer Ali. In Rangpur he met and influenced through Brahmo Krishna Dhan Ghose, a member of the small organization who had travelled to Britain in 1870 with Keshab Chandra Sen, but stayed and received a medical degree from the University of Aberdeen. Among Ghose’s youth, the philosopher and nationalist Sri Aurobindo. These vital encounters and influences apparently persuaded Ibrahim Saber to defy his father’s wishes and teach his two sisters English and Bengali in secret, by candlelight at night.
As a child, Begum Rokeya’s older sister, Karimunnesa Khanam, was only taught Arabic so that she could at least do her daily chores as a Muslim and recite the Quran. But she Karimunnesa decided to teach herself Persian and Bengali by watching and listening to her younger siblings and she learned to write by tracing the lines of the Bengali alphabet on the ground. Although her father was somewhat supportive when first informed of her efforts, local devout leaders and her neighbors soon urged him to marry her. When Karimunnesa was only fourteen years old, she arranged for her to marry the son of her circle of relatives, Jomidar Ghaznavi. It was 1869, the year in which Syed Ameer Ali began his first stay in England and in which John Stuart Mill published The Subjugation of Women. Karimunnesa was lucky that her husband, Abdul Hakim Khan Ghaznavi, and her circle of relatives encouraged her to learn Bengali properly. Later poetry of hers suggests that it was a satisfied marriage, but tragically her husband died after nine years of married life, leaving Karimunnesa with two young children. Determined to provide the children with the most productive education imaginable, she moved to Calcutta so they could proceed to school. When her eldest son was around fourteen, she sent him to England for further education (and later to France and Italy), over the objections of many around her. Novelist Mir Mosharraf Hossain, who served as the estate’s manager until 1894, set his novel Gazi Miar Bostani (1899) around a Jomidar circle of relatives in north-east Bengal and included a Muslim female character in it, an aristocrat. informed that it was undoubtedly founded in Karimunnesa. .
Karimunnesa continued with her intellectual pursuits, reading Bengali, Arabic, Persian, and even some English after her husband’s death while taking on her abundant day-to-day jobs in terms of jomidari and family. As he later explained to Begum Rokeya in a letter, he made a decision in the sixty-seven-year-old to inform himself well about Arabic so that he could perceive what he was reading in the Qur’an instead of simply reciting it “like a parrot. “He helped finance the magazine Ahmadi, first published in 1886, with the aim of fostering friendship between Hindus and Muslims. Karimunnesa also wrote poetry and essays that she herself never committed to publishing. In 1923-1924, Begum Rokeya published some of Karimunnesa’s poems anonymously in a diary. of the main Muslim supporters of the nationalist Swadeshi movement in Bengal.
According to her memories in Aborodhbashini (Women in Isolation), an e-book she entrusted to her mother, Begum Rokeya began observing purdah when she was just five years old. While it could not have been easy, we will have to remember that in at least for women from elite families, isolation did not mean being confined to a small, dark space, but a demarcation of distinct male and female spaces into a vast space and property. Begum Rokeya would recall: “We get up to the cry of the birds in the morning; the call of the foxes indicates that the Maghreb (evening) prayer is near. Our formative years were spent happily in the gloomy forests of rural Bengal. “
Rokeya later described her homeschooling as learning the Arabic alphabet, followed by reading the Quran. Understanding was not a hobby, let alone a priority. The furthest a woman could go with Arabic, with her father’s support, was to a hafeza, the one who had memorized the entire Qur’an. As for Persian and Urdu, he noted, progress was difficult because there were no simple books for the new informers. Finally, she complains bitterly, “even in Bengal, young women are not systematically reported Bengali. “
Begum Rokeya’s protégé and first biographer, Shamsunnahar Mahmud, later reported Rokeya’s deep gratitude for her brothers’ “love and care” in education. Although the well-informed Bengali Muslim elite of their time disapproved of Bengali and liked Urdu and Persian, because they felt that Bengali was not Islamic enough, young Rokeya had the opportunity to master Bengali and English with the help of an older brother, an older sister. Array and husband. He entrusted the last volume of Motichur, his collection of previously published essays, to his apajaan (dear elder sister) Karimunnesa, in gratitude for the “grace of his affection” and the “blessings” that allowed him to learn Bengali in spite of the hostility surrounding them. and be well informed enough not to do so during his “14 years in Bhagalpur, where you may not find a single user to talk Bengali to. “Similarly, for his role in his education, he entrusted his 1924 short story Padmarag (The Ruby) to his older brother, Ibrahim Saber, who “molded me without marrying” and was “my only instructor. “
In 1896, when Rokeya was sixteen, Ibrahim arranged for her to marry Syed Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengal official. Although she was brought up in Urdu at Bhagalpur in Bihar, Sakhawat Hossain had learned some Bengali while he was reading at Hooghly College in Bengal. He too had traveled to England on a government scholarship to study agriculture. A widower and father of a daughter, he was some twenty years older than Rokeya. Ibrahim had met him when he was stationed in Rangpur and must have concluded that he would be interested in the intellectual interests of his sister. In fact, Sakhawat Hossain actively encouraged Rokeya’s further schooling, and she was able to overcome longing for her by channeling her energies into writing. Rokeya gave birth to two daughters, but neither survived beyond a few months. These losses, combined with her husband’s diabetes, vision problems, and ultimately her death 13 years after the marriage, resulted in a relatively brief and unfulfilling married life. However, she remained grateful for Sakhawat’s ActiveArray. He encouraged Rokeya to socialize with knowledgeable women from Bhagalpur’s Hindu and Christian communities, which no doubt helped Rokeya gain a broader attitude about women, education and religion.
Sakhawat died in 1909, leaving Rokeya with a huge sum of cash to be used in particular in women’s education. She founded a school for girls in Bhagalpur the same year, but a circle of family disputes soon forced her to move to Kolkata. There, in 1911, she founded the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School. Other Bengali Muslim women, invariably from well-connected wealthy families, had opened schools in recent decades, but the only two that had survived so far were the Nawab Faizunnesa Girls’ School and the Suhrawardy Girls’ School. The latter was founded in 1909 by Khujista Akhtar Begum, who had studied extensively with his father, Obaidullah al-Obaidi Suhrawardy, the first superintendent of Dhaka Madrasa and instructor of Syed Ameer Ali and others. His son Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy is said to be the prime minister of Pakistan.
In addition to her paintings with the school, Rokeya has been involved in several women’s organizations. adding literacy, among deficient women. It is the first organization in Bengal founded in particular to unite Muslim women, to the dismay of the Samajpatis, literally, the lords of society, as he called the tough conservative men who opposed his efforts. Over the years, the Bengal branch will operate more and more autonomously from the original Anjuman founded in Aligarh. She was also involved in several organizations that brought together women from other devout communities, such as Bangiya Nari Samaj (Bengali Women’s Society) for women’s suffrage in Bengal, the Women’s Education League of Bengal and the All India Women’s Conference.
Begum Rokeya wrote basically in Bengali and began publishing in 1902, basically essays on social issues. Her 1903 work, “Alonkar na badge of slavery,” marked the beginning of Rokeya’s explicitly feminist writing. It was published in Calcutta. Mahila (Woman) newspaper, edited by Girish Chandra Sen, a Brahmo who, curiously, had been the first to translate the Qur’an into Bengali. There are still nothing marks of “slavery on our bodies,” like the “iron chains” of prisoners.
An edited edition of the essay was printed under the name “Amader Abonoti” (Our Degradation) in September 1904 in Nabanoor (New Heavenly Light), edited by Syed Emdad Ali. One of the first newspapers published by Muslim intellectuals in Bengal, Nabanoor was published between 1903 and 1906 and actively invited women to participate and “help us in our literary endeavors and lead the country towards further development. “Begum Rokeya answered the call, along with many other women, Hindus and Muslims. Another edition of this article, called “Strijatir Abonoti” (The Degradation of Woman), was included in her first collection of essays, Motichur (A Pearl Necklace), also published in 1904. Five difficult paragraphs were removed due to the furor. They had already caused, possibly because they criticized the faith: “Every time a sister tried to lift her head, her head was sprinkled with the excuse of faith or the strength of the words of the sacred texts. . . . It must be said that in the end, “faith” has strengthened the bonds of our slavery; Men dominate women under the pretext of faith. “
These passages have been removed because they have outraged many readers. With his complaint about “religion” in general, he angered not only his fellow Muslims, but also members of other communities among which he lived in early 20th century India. Although she was writing in an era of developing Muslim nationalist sentiment among some elite Muslim men that would culminate in the partition of Bengal in 1905, Rokeya had no interest in claiming the genius of women’s rights under Islam in spaces like inheritance. or the right to contract. For her, all religions, including Islam, were inherently problematic for women. Although she was writing in the early years of India’s anti-colonial nationalist movement, she Rokeya did not subscribe to the Indian nationalist position that the Indian personal sphere and its inhabitants, women, were morally and spiritually impressive to their Western counterparts. Finally, writing at a time when Imperial Britain was concerned about oppressed Indian and Muslim women, she was not inspired by the Western style of women’s emancipation or the efforts of some Indian reformers to usher in modernity. . just revealing the women. In “Strijatir Abonoti”, she wondered if the Parsi (Zoroastrian) women of India, who were among the first to unveil themselves and wear Western clothing, were “truly free from intellectual slavery”. His reply: “Certainly not! His revelation is not the result of his own decision. The Parsee men dragged their wives out of purdah in blind imitation of the Europeans. He shows no initiative from his wives. They are also lifeless like them they were before. When their men kept them in solitary confinement, they stayed there. When the men dragged them out through their “nose rings”, they got out. This cannot be called an achievement through women.
Unlike Guy and his male contemporaries from all devout communities, Rokeya sought to teach women and women to expand their intellectual universities and help them achieve economic independence. For example, the daughter of the Brahmo reformer Keshab Chandra Sen would later describe the curriculum of the school her father had founded in Calcutta, and named after Queen Victoria, was aimed at training women only in what it would be useful in their roles as wives and mothers. While Begum Rokeya identified the truth that most women of her time would marry and become mothers, she, like feminists before her, laments the wide gap between the education of men and women: “When a man measures the distance between the sun and the stars from earth, the woguy measures the length of a pillowcase (to be sewn). When the husband, through his mind’s eye flights travels through the solar sphere surrounded by the planetary system, measures the length of the sunArrayArrayArray and detects the movements of comets, the woguy walks around the kitchen, weighs the food to be cooked and observes the movements of his kitchen helper”.
And indeed, Begum Rokeya’s school curriculum was quite extensive. As someone familiar with the school explained in a letter: “Everything is taught in the school, from recitation of the Qur’an and its tafseer [exegesis] to English, Bengali, Urduarray, Persian, home nursing, first aid, cooking, sewing and everything else. ” other essentials -muslim women have to learn”. Rokeya had made the decision that the sciences of geography, history, and fitness were also necessary. However, in her presidential speech at the first Bangiya Nari Shikkha Samiti (Bengal Women’s Educational Conference) in February 1927, she Rokeya lamented that women performed poorly in such subjects. He explained that this happened “because they don’t see any position in this global other than their school campus and the personal quarters of their own houses, and they forget about the rest of the other people in the global except their own father and siblings. ” What they needed was a “good schooling. ” For Rokeya and her contemporaries, schooling was much more than literacy: it was the very means of increasing the presence and participation of women in society at large.
Thinking pragmatically, however, she provided curtain transportation for her students because she knew that without it, many women would not be allowed to attend. He criticized the practice of solitary confinement, in which women had separate rooms in elite houses from which they were not allowed to leave. As she noted in her presidential address, isolation has reduced the wisdom of the women’s world. At the same time, as his observation on Parsi shows, he recognizes the superficiality of liberation granted to women through male reformers eager to impress Western powers.
In Rokeya’s eyes, the abuse of women was a global challenge that affected not only the women of India (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Parsis) but also the women of imperial Britain. In “Ardhangi” (The Female Half), first published in the monthly magazine Mahila (Woman) in 1903, she spoke of Christian women who, despite all the educational opportunities offered to them, “could not free themselves from intellectual slavery” and remained “preoccupied with the concept of buying a new hood,” oblivious to the “prosaic truth of the debt burden. “Her novel Padmarag (1924) is also populated by female characters from devout origins. This “gallery of oppressed wives” includes Helen Horace, a white British woman whose story was animated through newspaper articles about Cecil Rutherford’s real-life trials. Upon learning of Helen’s unfortunate experiences, a Muslim figure named Sakina laments, “This England, this noxious and putrid England, pretends to be civilized!”
Rokeya’s partial Bengali translation of the 1896 novel Murder of Delicia, through a successful and prolific Victorian Marie Corelli, also represented an effort to motivate her readers to take a fresh look at the lives of women in Britain and India. . Array Rokeya chided Indians who subscribed to the perceived superiority of European civilization and assumed that women there were “free, exceptionally talented, equal to men, revered in society, etc. ” She noted that Delicia’s account revealed a very different situation, similar to that in which the Indian women found themselves: “Everything is hollow! Poor me! Women are defenseless all over the world!” In both India and England, despite the latter’s veneer of egalitarianism, legislation and establishments discriminated against women and left them vulnerable to the machinations of unscrupulous male relatives. In either context, Rokeya demonstrated that the ideal woman was docile and submissive, and women tended to remain so since laws, to quote Corelli, were “made by men for themselves and for their own convenience. ” in many tactics than the Muslim Indian character Mazluma. For example, as a Muslim woman, Mazluma, unlike Delicia, had no legal responsibility to give a contribution to her husband’s or even her household’s expenses. “Is this civilization ? Is it cavalry?”
Closer to home, Rokeya mentioned the problematic remedy of women in devout Hindu texts and practice, but also pointed to the advances the Hindu network had recently made in educating women. In an English-language article published in the Mussalguy on December 6, 1927, aptly called “God Gives, Man Steals” – the name is a bitter inversion of the old adage “Man proposes, God disposes” – she challenged men Muslims to do more. for Muslim women. Array “It is an irony of fate,” he wrote, “that the Hindus who are forced through their Chariot Shastras to treat women as slaves and farm animals and marry off their daughters before they are a bit at home. ” Above their childhood, that is to say within ten years, they leave, in fact, the greatest freedom to their wives and give them a higher education. He reminded his readers that Islamic scriptures already claimed more rights for women than they enjoy lately, that God “made no difference in the general life of men and women”, and that the Prophet had stipulated that it was the duty of men and women to obtain knowledge. However, she lamented in this and other articles, Muslim men continued to violate Muslim women’s rights under Islam, such as the right to consent to marriage and the right to inheritance. For her, however, “the worst crime that our brothers commit against us is to deprive us of schooling. “
In an effort to convince the Indian Muslim warring groups of women’s education that Muslim women enjoyed a God-given right to education, that their very concept was based on Islam and not copied from the West, Rokeya he enthusiastically noted how other Muslim countries have compounded the cause of women’s schooling. His 1927 presidential address to the Bengal Women’s Education Conference, discussed above, singled out Egypt and Turkey as countries that had once “opposed the schooling of women, but had lost and learned from their mistakes, now They have returned to the direct path. ” “, a reference undoubtedly to the direct wake of Islam. Furthermore, “Turkey did not directly follow in the footsteps of the United States; on the contrary, it complied with one of the inviolable teachings of our religion, since the first user to mandate the equivalent schooling of men and women as a duty was our respected Prophet. ” Rokeya went on to criticize the hypocrisy of Muslims: “the The same Muslims who are ready to give their lives for the call of the Prophet (or even for the insult of a piece of brick [thrown] at a ruined mosque), why reluctant to stick to the authentic direction of the Prophet? To appeal to Muslim men’s sense of partying with other communities – in education, employment and political strength – he cited Shaikh Abdullah, who with his wife, Wahid Jahan Begum, founded a girls’ school in Aligarh in 1906 and was a close associate of Syed Ahmed Khan: “How can a network that helps keep part of its population ignorant and imprisoned in the form of purdah compete in the affairs of life with those who have provided equivalent opportunities for their wives?” He denounced the willingness of Muslim men to donate generously to prestigious men’s higher education establishments and yet claim poverty when asking for cash for women’s education: “Muslim men think they can get into paradise depending on a few Graduates from Aligarh University, Dhaka University. and Islamia College in Calcutta, and they will be able to carry their wives and sisters in a bag as they cross the road. ” But since each and every Muslim was guilty before God on their own, “instead of hoping to put heaven above another’s er, women concentrate on raising their daughters.
Begum Rokeya’s long-term vision extended well beyond her immediate network of Bengali Muslims to encircle Indian women in general and towards an India where other communities can thrive together while retaining their differences. As she said in her essay “Sugrihini” (The Good Housewife), “We are not just Hindus, Muslims, Parsees or Christians and we are not just Bengalis, Madrasi, Marawari or Punjabis, we are Indians. We are Indians first and foremost. ” , then Muslim, Sikh or whatever. ” Even “Sultana’s Dream” begins with the narrator “thinking lazily of the condition of the Indian woman,” while her essay “Ardhangi” ends with a rousing call for the schooling of all women in India because “unless Indian women wake up, India cannot rise up. ” She clarified: “I need the best for my sisters and I do not intend to affect social and devotional ties. Array We can lose our brains while maintaining our respective ethnic differences. ” The problem, she believed, was “our lack of education,” which, as she wrote in the original “Strijatir Abonoti,” deprives women of the “qualifications to be wise and holy. ” and blindly conforming to “those devout texts [which] are nonetheless rules and regulations created through men. “
Despite her dependence on the colonial government for the formal popularity of her school and for its funding, Rokeya did not hesitate to denounce British colonial rule, albeit with sophisticated tactics and regularly in conjunction with her main passion, women’s rights and especially women’s education. His short story “Gyanphal” (The Fruit of Knowledge), for example, is the allegorical account of an island, Kanak, which receives visitors “beautiful, but apart from their good physical appearance. The publicity arrangements established through those visitors led to famine. The story ends not only with the liberation of the other Kanak peoples from exploitative foreigners, but with a warning that society will not prosper if women do not have full access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Similarly, “Nurse Nelly”, based on a true tale, is the story of a housekeeper at a women’s hospital in the northern Indian city of Lucknow. Once a housewife in a middle-class Bengali Muslim household, Nayeema was converted to Christianity through nuns, renamed Nelly and brought to Lucknow. Recounting Nayeema’s suspenseful yet melodramatic metamorphosis, the narrator laments the risks posed by missionaries and the low point of schooling for women. During a layover in Agra, the narrator supports her point about the lack of education for men and women by comparing Mumtaz Mahal, “the woman who lies entombed in this famous mausoleum [the Taj Mahal]” built for her by her Mughal husband. . Emperor Shah Jahan, with former Empress Nur Jahan, whose “ordinary humble grave lies neglected . . . in an unfamiliar position in Lahore. ” It was education, not a giant tomb, that she “did [to Nur Jahan]. . . immortal . . . If the grace of education made her a radiant and famous figure, God forbid, the Taj Mahal would possibly be destroyed by earthquake or by war, but Nur Jahan’s glory will last forever. “
Towards the end of his life, when the Indian nationalist movement was in full swing, Rokeya alienated many Indians by refusing to condemn American publisher Katherine Mayo’s eeeebook Mother India. Mayo, whose holidays in India had been arranged in collusion with the British colonial authorities, argued in his 1927 book that Indian practices such as child marriage necessarily made the country unworthy of self-rule or independence. Bengal, as the “seat of the most bitter political turmoil”, gained particular attention as “one of the most sexually exaggerated regions of India”. The eeeebook provoked a flurry of livid criticism and criticism, with one from Gandhi himself being added, entitled “Sewage Inspector’s Report”. British colonial officials, for their part, encouraged its dissemination to Muslim readers in the hope that an e-book focused on ostensibly Hindu social ills would help drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims in the nationalist movement. In her essay “Rani Bhikarini” (The Beggar Queen), Rokeya chided Muslim men who seemed to think the disorders Mayo described were only for the Hindu community: “Look in the mirror. Look how you’re dressed too. the queens of your society in beggar clothes. Not to mention granting women their rights, there is no country, no race, no faith in this vast world that has identified women’s sense of identity. Rokeya not only refused to allow nationalist considerations to relegate the issue of women’s rights, but also rejected the notion that women’s prestige was an indicator of a country’s ability to govern itself. same. Array given the low prestige of women everywhere. For Rokeya, women’s emancipation and anti-colonial and anti-community struggles were therefore deeply intertwined and analogous. As she said with some bitterness in her speech to the Bengal Women’s Education Conference in 1927: “As the disinterested British government cannot bow to the aspirations of the Indians . . . and our non-Muslim neighbors cannot content themselves with the rights and claims of Muslims, so Muslim men cannot grant any wishes of prosperity to their women. ” Given “how intertwined we are with each other,” she continued, “as long as Muslim men pay no attention to their wives’ aspirations, the other 220 million Indians. . . Array will forget about the country’s 80 million Muslims “. [and] the British government will not give in to their demands either. “