Choudhary 1

Saksham

Professor Bharti Sharma

English Honors

10th November, 2021

Sultana’s dream as a feminist text

Feminism is paradoxically situated today. One American feminist famously diagnosed feminist’s
defeat in a political climate in which a dominant moral rights asserts the triumph of family and
family values over women’s career and legal rights Feminism is a primarily form of critique
rather than a program. It has variously sought to demystify, “difference” to isolate sources of
women’s subordination, to identify patriarchy as universal regime of male domination, to
analyze its roots and to deconstruct the sex-gender system. Feminist analysis of the condition of
women has for most part articulated in terms of the following negative existential aspects:
discrimination; oppression; exploitation; subordination; dispossession; powerlessness and
violence. Rokeya’s Sultana’s dream has two of the most radical form that such imagining has
taken. One is the vision of separation of the sexes resulting in a world without men, a society
exclusively of women, a Ladyland or Herland. And other is the destabilization of the gender,
conceptualize in terms both of an absence of gender difference as well as of its opposite, the
proliferation of gender. The first form of imagining identifies men as the source of the problem
and seeks to exclude them; the second diagnosis gender as the structural cause of the problem
and seeks to trouble the conceptual schema of male and female. It would try to frame Sultana’s
Dream in the context of Lyman Tower Sargent’s concept of ‘Social Dreaming’ and Donna
Fancourt’s focus of feminist utopia as ‘Altered State of Consciousness’. Altered state offers a
metaphor for the need to think differently, and highlight the importance of looking at society in
new and alternate ways.

Sultana’s dream is more of a utopian fiction wherein author offers a lively tour of the new world,
where a charmed visitor, “Sultana” is introduced by a native to wonders of the ladyland as she
calls the dream world. It is rightly admire for its charming conceit of a reversal of gender roles
which places women in government and visible in public place and men in powerless roles and
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invisible in domestic space. The consequences are entirely beneficial; and there is poetic justice
in the fate that men suffer as it is their own self-destructive aggression that brings them to defeat.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the utopia in Ladyland is the use of science, technology,
and education to harness renewable energy and practice sustainability. The women cook with
solar heat and control the weather through a balloon with pipes kept above the clouds (the
scientific explanation for this is too advanced for Sultana to understand). The women place a
heavy emphasis on the importance of education, as it is through the competition of female
scientists at two universities that these technological advances are made, all while the men are
“busy increasing their military power.” Along with these sustainable advances, the women of
Ladyland have eradicated medical ills and high rates of child mortality—Sultana notes that “they
were not subject to any kind of epidemic disease, nor did they suffer from mosquito bites as we
do. I was very much astonished to hear that in Ladyland no one died in youth except by
accident.”

In Sultana’s Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain has cautiously used inversion as a feminist tool.
She used several binary terms like ‘mardana’ and ‘zenana’, Ladyland in contrast to Calcutta etc.
It acts as a sort of female resistance by the writer. We find in the beginning that men in the
Ladyland are confined to zenana, where women used to be and in the end their conformity to the
situation converts the term ‘zenana’ into ‘mardana’. Ladyland, which literally could mean ‘land
of ladies’ or ‘land owned by ladies’ is contrasted at many times in the text to Calcutta, where
Sultana lives. The womanish attributes of being ‘shy and timid’ are related to men in the text.
Development of the nation is obtained through Science rather than through military power. Peace
is maintained and fight between nations is avoided. Relations in the Ladyland have become pure
and sacred in which distant cousins are as sacred as brothers in opposition to our common
culture. There are also two competing universities in which one invents Captive balloon and
other an instrument that traps Solar energy. These two compete each other for better
development of nation. Overall, one can safely observe writer’s preference of using inversion as
a critical device to prove the merit of this utopian land. It was rightly termed as a “Splendid
Revenge” by Rokeya Hossain’s brother against patriarchy.

Utilizing Donna Fancourt’s concept of dreaming and spirituality out of four altered states in the
text Sultana’s Dream, both the concepts act as a metaphor to emphasize the different modes of
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thought necessary to leap into the utopian movement, to achieve a paradigmatic shift of
consciousness necessary for radical transformative thought and action. Dreaming was presented
not only a private, but also a social project, which Lyman Tower rightly defined as ‘social
dreaming’ a means of accessing shared social visions. Spirituality in the Ladyland is developed
as a means of placing women at the centre of the theology, while at the same time bringing truth,
love, honesty and purity in the region.
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Works Cited

Primary Source
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Sultana’s Dream. New York: Feminist Press, 1988. Print.

Secondary Source

Fancourt, Donna. “Altered States: Feminist Utopian Literature.” Diss. University of Leicester,
2004. Print.
Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Pfaelzer, Jean. “The Changing of the Avant Garde: The Feminist Utopia”. Science-Fiction
Studies.15. 3. 1988. Print.