Education, women’s narrative, and feminist civil society activism: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopias
p. 109-116
Texte intégral
1This paper will focus on two feminist utopian narratives by the Indian and Bengali Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, the English work Sultana’s Dream (1905) and the Bengali work Padmarag, or The Ruby (1924), which I have recently compiled, translated (in the case of Padmarag), and introduced in a modern edition1. I shall analyse and contextualise these narratives within Rokeya’s broader career as feminist, urban civil society activist, and educator. I shall move to a consideration of how real-life female civil society activism, the imaginative conceptualization of female spaces and communities, and education seen in a non-docile, dialectical way intermesh, to create, simultaneously, weapons for transforming the present, and a sense of elusive horizons of empowerment of the marginalized.
2For those unacquainted with her work, the South Asian feminist Rokeya S. Hossain (1880-1932) was a superb polemical feminist essayist and novelist, a pioneering educator of Muslim girls and founder of a famous girls’ school which still thrives, and a developmental activist who organized women to do welfarist work in areas such as education, flood and famine relief, and vocational training. My presentation will analyse Rokeya’s sense of topography, from the technology-savvy, yet gardenlike spaces of Ladyland in Sultana’s Dream to the mapping of space in the female community in a house or hall, Tarini Bhavan (translatable as Salvation Hall), with its locus in early 20th century Calcutta. Arguably, a central impulse in women’s Utopias is narration of women’s life-histories and experiential narratives; I shall analyse the power of these narratives in Padmarag, and show how Rokeya grounds on such narratives her paradigm of adult women’s life-long learning and welfarist work, where a sense of loss and pain create empathy for the marginalized, and where creativity and imagination are prized as much as competence and professionalism.
Rokeya was very much an urban educator, writer, and activist, and I consider how, as a respectable, educated Muslim Indian woman she boldly came to the forefront in getting other women to work extensively in urban slum communities which had hitherto been taboo for them, while having within herself a utopian sense of beautiful yet useful Ladylands and Salvation Halls where women plan and create their own world.
3Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag axe narratives that devote a great deal of attention to education, seen as the central impulse behind the projects of welfare and progress in these utopias. These narratives bear the twin signatures of most literary female utopias across space and time, the belief that female knowledge and leadership are the keys to human development and progress, and that women do better at furthering such development if allowed to so untrammeled by men. Such narratives may be used both to understand female attempts at furthering human development and the good life, and to understand women’s longing for separate and separatist female realms.
4Utopias etymologically hinge on the pun in the meaning of the Greek word, at once ‘no place’, and ‘a good place’. Female utopias conjure up an idealized world where the ‘wrongs of women’ are ameliorated by active, thoughtful women. While Rokeya never used the term utopia to describe her works, her polemical feminism, the powerful sense of place or locus in her writing, and the many examples in her writing of playful, fabular, visionary generic forms, all these elements make the application of the term utopia particularly fruitful in the context of her work.
5The social activism and writing of someone like Rokeya assumes great significance when viewed in the light of the human development paradigm which is now so influential, most notably due to the work of the philosopher-economist Amartya Sen, and its institutionalisation by the United Nations Development Programme. In this model, economic growth by itself is held to be inadequate for the growth and welfare of society, and health, education, equity, and ethics are seen to be cornerstones for a good human life in a healthily growing society. Women and other marginalized groups taking public action to foster equity in areas such as education and health are seen to be key ingredients for social progress, and Rokeya’s work is an exemplar for this.
6The human development model is universalist, however, and female Utopias pose a conundrum for such universalism. On the one hand, cross-culturally and cross-historically, it can be demonstrated that women are writing in such narratives both about sisterhood among themselves, and about how to better the lot of other humans, men and women. Equally, women in such narratives adopt exclusionary and separatist positions. For a universalist, the consideration of equity, that is, those seemingly unequal measures which are motivated by social justice can be used to read female utopias without abandoning a universalist perspective. I myself adopt a nuanced cross-cultural, cross-historical universalist position vis à vis female utopias and their treatment of human development.
7Rokeya founded one of the first successful, modern schools for Muslim women in Kolkata, the Sakhawat Hossain Memorial School, which is today a government-aided school. She also mobilized an organization called the Anjuman-I-Khawatin-I-Islam which engaged in social welfare-oriented work, including slum development and organizing vocational training for women.
8In a lifelong effort to get conservative parents to send their daughters to her school, she maintained a highly respectable persona, even if her letters reveal an inner life filled with pain and a sense of loneliness. And yet she also wrote a fearless and graphic critique of the oppressiveness of the practice of female seclusion in the form of essays, first published in Bengali periodicals (1928-30), and later collected in book form under the title Abarodhbasini (The Secluded Ones). She also wrote two educative female utopias. The first, Sultana’s Dream, which is well-known today, and was written in English, is an astonishing achievement from someone who had never been to school, and whose studies of English had been conducted, in the face of paternal opposition, secretly with the help of a supportive elder brother ; this work was published in a Madras-based periodical, the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, in 1905. The second utopian narrative, Padmarag, was written in Bengali, and published by the author in 1924.
9The first work is a short, witty, delightful dream-vision, a virtuoso work which is formally elegant and compact, stylistically smooth-flowing, and intellectually witty and cunning. It deserves to be widely known-but the fact that it is very well-known certainly owes much to its being in English.
10The utopian country Ladyland in Sultana’s Dream is at once garden-like and pastoral in its landscape, while also being technologically and scientifically advanced. At the core of Ladyland’s success is female education and female cultivation of science and technology. Ladyland is governed by a queen who decrees universal female education, and founds separate universities for women. Here, the women develop technologies of great sophistication, one of which, a device to store, concentrate, and use solar heat, is used by the lady scientists during a war which threatens Ladyland. As a condition for helping the male army, the women, hitherto in seclusion, now put the men into seclusion, into a mardana, the male counterpart of the zenana. Once the war is won, the women continue to govern the country wisely and well, adopting a policy of peace and scientific progress. The enmeshing of landscapes full of beautiful gardens, flowers, and trees with admiring descriptions of technological marvels (such as tilling agricultural land with the help of electricity, and hydrogen-driven aircraft – this in a work written as far back as 1905 ! ) gives the utopia of Ladyland a memorable character.
11In today’s paper, I am, however, going to devote greater attention to the second work, Padmarag. The work is stylistically hybrid and uneven, dark and complex in its vision of female difficulties and female-led reform projects. It describes a female-founded and female-administered community set in contemporary Bengal, where women from diverse religions, regions, and ethnicities, with unhappy histories of patriarchal and familial oppression, band together with an educative and philanthropic project, their set of activities ranging from formal education to propagating crafts and caring for the sick and the destitute. It offers a series of personal narratives of the women working in the institution, narratives which recount and indict the familial and marital oppression to redress which the institution Tarini Bhavan is founded.
12The philanthropic institution at the centre of Padmarag, called ‘Tarini Bhavan’ is named after its founder, a young widow named Dinatarini Sen. ‘Dinatarini’ means saviour of the poor. Tarini Bhavan has a school, a workshop or training institute for adult women, a home for widows, and a home for the destitute. The school has both day-scholars and boarders. A ‘Society for the Alleviation of Female Suffering’ forms the moral, ideological, and institutional core of the project. Some of the inhabitants of Tarini Bhavan are called ‘sisters’, short for ‘sisters of the poor’, wear a uniform of saffron or blue, and have no separate rooms. The space that is created in Tarini Bhavan is thus somewhat like a nunnery or ashram, even though the workers of Tarini Bhavan have to come into constant contact with the established social milieu in the course of their work. Tarini Sen’s activities are not looked upon with favour by her family, who ostracise her, and spread scandal about her as a consorter with fallen women, lepers, and orphans. In a sense, Dinatarini, like many of the women she befriends, is an outcaste from society.
13In the Tarini Bhavan workshop or training institute, needy women are trained to earn their own living. Unmarried women, married women, and widows-women from all statuses and classes come here. Bookbinding, spinning, and sewing are undertaken, sweets are made to be sold, teacher training is given, typing is taught, as is nursing: we get a veritable compendium of the various marketable skills for women in Rokeya’s time. The women also set out to deliver relief in kind, including through nursing, to places struck by disasters such as famine or floods. Some of the trainees help in running the home for the destitute where refugeless poor and handicapped people receive medical attention.
14The school does not take grants from the colonial government. Nor does it accept donations or help from princely states pledging allegiance to the British government. Nor are they taught the kind of colonial history that teaches them to despise their own pasts and culture. Rokeya’s nationalist agenda becomes clear through such prescriptions. The pupils are also given an education in all standard subjects, such as mathematics, geography, physical and life sciences, and are taught to be self-sufficient.
15Rokeya’s vision in this novella is uncompromisingly unsectarian, showing that Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, black women and white women, all suffer from patriarchal oppression, and all must receive succour from communities of determined reformist women. She creates critique after critique of institutionalised familial, marital, and sexual practices that lead women literally to madness or the brink of death or suicide, as in the case of the eponymous heroine of the work.
16The narratives of these women are conveyed through the topos of ‘sad stories’ or pathetic tales, almost in a gesture of playful cliché. These women are all, in differing ways, ‘biye fail’, as the novella says, in a pun on ‘biye’, the word for marriage in Bengali, and BA, or Bachelor of Arts, the academic degree, a play on words that conveys in wry shorthand the difficulties and sadness of women failing at their most common examination, namely marriage. This ranges from Saudamini, the chaste Hindu wife who is driven into madness after being falsely demonized as a monstrous stepmother, to the white Englishwoman Helen Horace, ‘tied for life to a lunatic’ whom she cannot divorce according to English laws.
17Padmarag is named after a mysterious young woman rescued by the Tarini Bhavan sisters, nicknamed Padmarag or Ruby, who carries a bewildering number of names and identities, including Siddika and Zainab. At the end of the novella, Rokeya refuses to give her heroine the conventional ending of the courtship novel, rejecting heterosexual domesticity as the telos of women’s lives: she explodes the romance-style courtship narrative in which the highminded, well-educated, suffering young woman is reabsorbed into the world of patriarchal domesticity.
18Padmarag is a gentlewoman-centric project. Women of the landholding and professional classes form the core of Rokeya’s utopian vision, and the ethic is firmly welfarist and charitable. Nonetheless, Rokeya’s inclusionary ethic is remarkable. She takes pains to draw into her writing the worlds of women from different classes, including the labouring class. She also, while keeping a firm commitment to Muslim women, espouses the cause of white, black, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian women, and sees women’s oppression as global, in histo-rico-sociological perspective.
19In real life, after her husband died in 1909, Rokeya, a young widow facing maltreatment at the hands of her marital family, took the bold step of moving from her marital home in Bhagalpur, a small town in the provinces, to the metropolis, Calcutta, now Kolkata, in 1910. Here, she utilized the legacy that her husband had left her ; she rented accommodation, and started a school with eight students in 1911. She herself lived in the house where the school was located.
20In 1912 and 1913, she lost her mother and father respectively. Between 1911 and 1932, the year she died, her school moved thrice, from one rented house to another. The school kept on progressing; by 1927, it was a high school, and in 1932, 75 per cent of the students who appeared for the baccalaureate passed their examinations.
21Rokeya’s writing and work show the active role she played as urban educator and activist. She took steps which to us seem innocuous, but which were revolutionary for the time. For example, when she arranged for buses to bring the students to and from her school, many people protested on the grounds that the girls were becoming bepurdah, that is, losing the seclusion meant to be proper among conservative Calcutta Muslims. What is equally remarkable, however, is the very large number of people, men and women, who stood by Rokeya, and supported her cause. Right from the year 1911, to 1926 and beyond, Rokeya wrote a series of letters to a leading Indian periodical, the Mussalman, in which she campaigned for her school, and for Muslim girls’ education. She pleaded for donations from affluent and progressive individuals, and candidly described both the successes and difficulties that she faced in her educational programme. This is excellent practice on the part of a civil society leader, we recognize today. Rokeya was not ashamed, in these letters, to canvass books from her personal collection, as well as books written by her, for sale to raise money for the school.
22In the letters to the Mussalman, Rokeya also discussed key pedagogical issues faced in her school, notably the issue of the language of instruction. Rokeya was a passionate campaigner for Bengali being taught, and being used as a medium of instruction, but found that most parents preferred English or Urdu as a medium. This issue of Bengali as the preferred language of Bengali Muslims would eventually lead to a great political movement that led to the birth of the modern country of Bangladesh, which liberated itself from Urdu-majority Pakistan in 1971.
23Padmarag shows, in thinly disguised fictional contours, how much energy Rokeya devoted to community mapping in urban contexts. The teachers in the school themselves went from house to house in particular localities, campaigning that the Muslim girls be sent to school. They had to go and check whether the horse-drawn carriages that were the school ‘buses’ could reach the narrow lanes in which some of the students lived.
24Through her other organization, the Calcutta branch of the Anjuman-I-Khawatin-I-Islam, Rokeya herself went, and sent other Bengali Hindu and Muslim gentlewomen into various slums to take literacy classes, sewing classes, and handicrafts classes. The vocational training schemes for resourceless young women she describes in Padmarag are delineated from real-life experience. This constant undertow of real, constructive work gives Rokeya’s utopian narratives a dialectical quality. The sense of dream, plangency, and elusiveness are present just as strongly, and are conveyed in a whole variety of imaginative, speculative, and connotative modes, ranging from science fiction and pastoral (in Sultana’s Dream), to folk-tale and fairy-tale, evocations of music, and lyrical verse interludes (all powerful elements in Padmarag) ».
Rokeya found that to be gendered a woman in a modernizing and commercializing society has paradoxical consequences, particularly for gentlewomen. On the one hand claimants of a status as key citizens of a supposedly polite and civicminded emergent bourgeois society, women like her also, on the other hand, reveal through their writings the deprivations, and inequities that get embedded in society in its phase of modernization and commercial progress. Rokeya pushes for cautious modernization, and writes intensively about ways to secure women’s education in a period where ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ are vaunted watchwords – but she also shows the ambiguities of progress, and attempts to bring into her work notions recuperated from the domestic sphere, such as compassion, trust, affective bonds, inwardness, conversational networks and so on.
25Rokeya was, I also contend, a pioneering generator of ‘social capital’, for urban Muslim girls’ education in particular. Social capital is often seen as the networks, norms, and trust that facilitate social organization, and fuel its development, not just in economic terms, but also through commitment to social networks, civic vigilance and activism, and public action. Rokeya’s work and writing show how social capital may be gendered, in a process that is at once ethical, painful, creative, and constructive. In her paradigm of social change, a constant haunting awareness of women’s loss and pain actually fuels urgency towards constructive developmental work.
26The work of women like Rokeya, and their practical yet utopian vision, reconfigures notions of economics, to pick up the metaphor of ‘capital’ in the term ‘social capital’. With economics seen, in its Greek sense, as the ‘nomos’, that is, technique of managing our global ‘oikos’, that is, household of resources (whether human, social, or physical), women function at one level as agents who are powerful in their traditional roles of nurturing, caring and fostering bonds of trust and altruism. At another level, particularly in periods of sweeping social change, women also become powerful agents of social transformation, demanding and creating spaces for themselves and other disprivileged groups, most notably in the realm of education, an area that offers the consummate bridging of the private and the public spheres.
27We live today in the world of women changemakers, of developmental practices that highlight, for example, women’s success as teachers in primary schools, and their key role as responsible members of the community that must make the schooling system more accountable. The committed, competent, successful women leaders of feminist and developmental organizations today have much to learn by looking back at an array of earlier committed women such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain whose ideologies and practices of human development are revealed fascinatingly through the feminist utopian narratives they crafted, in real life and in literature.
Bibliographie
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hossain Rokeya S., Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, ed. trans, and introduced by Barnita Bagchi New Delhi Penguin Modern Classics, 2005.
Notes de bas de page
1 . Rokeya S. Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, ed. trans, and introduced by Barnita Bagchi (New Delhi : Penguin Modern Classics, 2005).
Auteur
-
Barnita Bagchi
Lecturer in Human Sciences
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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