Description

One of the first sciencefiction utopian stories and one of the first feminist utopias by celebrated pioneering feminist educator activist and Bengali writer Rokeya Hossain

A Penguin Classics Edition

Sultana a Muslim woman living in colonial India falls asleep and wakes up in a transformed future world a utopia in which men rather than women are relegated to the domestic sphere Women now free to explore the outside world at will and pursue an education run a peaceful and just society using scientific principles to harvest energy from the sun and live in harmony with nature Sultanas Dream was published in 1905 in the Indian Ladies Magazine the first English language periodical edited by and targeted at Indian women Like the periodical the story broke new ground

As a pioneering work of science fiction and feminist utopian literature at the turn of the century Sultanas Dream is strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy war industrialization and the exploitation of the natural world speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much as its own At a time when British colonialism was using the treatment of women in India as justification for colonial intervention there Hossains story in imagining a world in which men rather than women are kept inside positions her protest against Islamic patriarchy within a larger feminist vision that takes on Western as well as Islamic forms of gender hierarchy Her novella Padmarag is similarly utopian in its depiction of a womenrun school and welfare center and is both feminist and anticolonial in its outlook In both these works Hossain seizes the critique of gender roles in India away from Western commentators and turns it against British interference while also enlarging the critique to take on the problem of gender more broadly