Writing Rokeya: Muslim Women’s Life-Writing, Intergenerational Camaraderie and Activism in Twentieth Century Bengal

Abstract

This paper showcases how the intersubjective is at the heart of women’s associations through Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s nurturance and support of younger colleagues in colonial Bengal. Arguing that individual memory can be constitutive of institutional history/identity, it focuses on Shamsunnahar Mahmud’s Rokeya Jibani (1937), the first ‘official’ biography of Rokeya, and Sufia Kamal’s memoir, Ekale Amader Kal (1988), both of which posit Rokeya as a foremother to women’s movements of the time and inscribe her within a silsila (chain) of activist women who are sources of inspiration to successive generations. It also explores how Mahmud and Kamal emulate and extend Rokeya’s paradigm of multigenerational sorority.

Keywords:

• Anjuman
• foremother
• Rokeya
• silsila
• women’s associations
• intergenerational camaraderie
• activist networks

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of this special issue for organising the wonderful symposium at which this paper was first presented and for bringing together the excellent selection of articles amongst which it now finds itself. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of South Asia for their insightful comments and generative suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fabio Giomi, Making Muslim Women European: Voluntary Associations, Gender, and Islam in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021): 6.

2. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993): 2.

3. This is the version of her name that has become most common today, partly thanks to the primary materials examined in this paper. While there is evidence to show that she herself did not spell her name this way in English, preferring instead to sign her personal communication with ‘Roquiah’ and submissions to newspapers and periodicals with the more formal ‘Mrs R.S. Hossain’, it must be acknowledged that ‘Rokeya’ is the closest English transliteration of the spelling she used in letters written in Bangla.

4. Roushan Jahan, ‘Rokeya: An Introduction to Her Life’, in Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The Secluded Ones, ed. Roushan Jahan (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1988): 37–57; Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).

5. Niaz Zaman, ‘From Islamic Feminism to Radical Feminism: Roquiah Sakhawat Hossein to Taslima Nasrin’, Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 10, no. 1 (2016): 4–26, https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/ajell/article/view/781.

6. Barnita Bagchi, ‘Fruits of Knowledge: Polemics, Humour and Moral Education in the Writings of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Lila Majumdar and Nabaneeta Dev Sen’, Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 7, no. 2 (2013): 126–38, https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/AJELL/article/view/373.

7. I refer to Rokeya by first name rather than last name to reflect how the primary texts and their authors lovingly address her, and how she, as well as all other writers, are referred to in Bangla scholarship (for instance, Tagore as Rabindranath).

8. Bharati Ray, Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).

9. Barnita Bagchi, ‘Two Lives: Voices, Resources, and Networks in the History of Female Education in Bengal and South Asia’, Women’s History Review 19, no. 1 (2010): 51–69, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020903444668; Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, ‘From Sakhawat Memorial School to Rokeya Hall: A Journey towards Language as Self-Respect’, Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 7, no. 2 (2013): 22–38, https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/ajell/article/view/316/297.

10. Giomi, Making Muslim Women European, 8.

11. Barbara Southard, ‘Bengal Women’s Education League: Pressure Group and Professional Association’, Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1984): 55–88; Linda M. Perkins, ‘The National Association of College Women: Vanguard of Black Women’s Leadership and Education, 1923–1954’, The Journal of Education 172, no. 3 (1990): 65–75; Marnie S. Anderson, ‘Women and Political Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Case of the Okayama Joshi Konshinkai (Okayama Women’s Friendship Society)’, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, no. 44 (2013): 43–66.

12. Constance Hardesty, ‘Mirror, Model, Muse: Institutional Memory and Identity in the Dublin, Oxford and Royal Societies’, in Memory and Identity in the Learned World: Community Formation in the Early Modern World of Learning and Science, ed. Koen Scholten, Dirk van Miert and Karl A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2022): 199–234; 225–27.

13. Bagchi, ‘Two Lives’, 51.

14. Ibid., 52.

15. Md. Mahmudul Hasan, ‘Commemorating Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Contextualising Her Work in South Asian Muslim Feminism’, in ‘Special Issue on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) and Edwin Thumboo (1933–)’, in Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 7, no. 2 (2013): 39–59; 44, https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/ajell/article/view/317/298.

16. Sreejata Paul, ‘Sofia Khatun’s Silsila: A Genealogy of Foremothers in Print, in Women Writers and Social/Political Activism’, Women: A Cultural Review 34, no. 3 (2023): 171–86; 172, https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2241721.

17. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983): 231–43.

18. Jacqueline K. Bryant, The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women’s Literature: Clothed in My Right Mind (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999): 13–14.

19. Shamsunnahar Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani (Kolkata: Vishwakosh Parishad, 2005): 6.

20. Padma Anagol, ‘Feminist Inheritances and Foremothers: The Beginnings of Feminism in Modern India’, Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 523–46; 533, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2010.502398.

21. Paul, ‘Sofia Khatun’s Silsila’, 177–78.

22. Ibid., 175–76.

23. Dahlia Bhattacharya, ‘Towards Emancipation: Reflection of Writings of Some Muslim Women in the Twentieth Century’, Karatoya: North Bengal University Journal of History 8 (2015): 156–71; 160, https://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/3928.

24. Saika Hossain, ‘Reading between the Lines: The Writings of the Bengali Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal’, Pratidhwani the Echo 7, no. 1 (2018): 266–77; 274, https://www.thecho.in/files/32.-SAIKA-HOSSAIN.pdf.

25. Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani, 46.

26. Ibid., 27.

27. Ibid., 26.

28. Ibid., 32.

29. Ibid., 32.

30. Ibid., 49.

31. Ibid., 23, 24.

32. Ibid., 22.

33. Zaman, ‘From Islamic Feminism’, 13.

34. Sufia Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal (Dhaka: Shraban Prakashani, 2002): 36, 39.

35. Zaman, ‘From Islamic Feminism’, 14.

36. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 37.

37. Ibid., 42.

38. Bryant, Foremother Figure, 20.

39. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 39.

40. Ibid., 39. Kamal’s postulation here conflicts with information provided in Rokeya Rachanabali, which reproduces records of seven of the first eight students at Sakhawat Memorial, including their and their fathers’ names, which clearly show that they belonged to ashraf families: see Abdul Quadir, Rokeya Rachanabali (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1971): 533.

41. Ibid., 41.

42. Ibid., 42.

43. Ibid., 41.

44. Ibid., 41, 42.

45. Ibid., 40.

46. Bagchi, ‘Two Lives’, 56.

47. Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani, 48.

48. Ibid., 35.

49. Ibid., 24.

50. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 40.

51. Bhattacharya, ‘Towards Emancipation’, 163.

52. Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani, 10.

53. Ibid., 8.

54. Yasmin Hossain, ‘The Begum’s Dream: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Broadening of Muslim Women’s Aspirations in Bengal’, South Asia Research 12, no. 1 (1992): 1–19; 6, https://doi.org/10.1177/026272809201200101.

55. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, ‘Lukano Ratan’, in Rokeya Rachanasangraha (The Collected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain), ed. Miratun Nahar (Kolkata: Vishwakosh Parishad, 2001): 415–17; 415.

56. Mohammad A. Quayum, ‘Begum Rokeya: Tale of a Visionary’, The Daily Star, December 8, 2012, accessed May 2, 2023, https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-260312.

57. Hasan, ‘Commemorating Rokeya’, 46.

58. Yasmin Hossain, ‘The Education of the Secluded Ones: Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain 1880–1932’, Canadian Woman Studies 13, no. 1 (1992): 56–58; 57, https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/37659/34209.

59. Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani, 11.

60. Amin, World of Muslim Women, 219.

61. Ibid., 231.

62. Shadab Bano, ‘Wahid Jahan, A Reformer’s Wife and Partner in Muslim Women’s Reform at Aligarh’, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan 25, no. 1 (2018): 1–14; 7, https://doi.org/10.46521/pjws.025.01.0051.

63. Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998): 285.

64. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 42.

65. Rashed Mahmud, ‘Feminist Thoughts of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Sufia Kamal: A Comparative Study’, Language in India 20 (2020): 170–87; 179, http://www.languageinindia.com/aug2020/rashedfeministrokeyaandsufiakamalcomparativestudy1.html.

66. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 39.

67. Md. Inamur Rahaman, ‘Women in the Anti-Imperialist Movement: A Case Study of Burdwan District, 1930–47’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 75 (2014): 575–80; 578.

68. Mohammad A. Quayum, ‘Begum Rokeya and Begum Sufia: An Enduring “Mother-Daughter” Bond’, The Daily Star, June 17, 2023, accessed June 17, 2023, https://www.thedailystar.net/star-literature/news/begum-rokeya-and-begum-sufia-enduring-mother-daughter-bond-3348331.

69. Kamal, Ekale Amader Kal, 43.

70. Mahmud, Rokeya Jibani, 33.

71. Quayum, ‘Begum Rokeya’, n.p.

72. Amin, World of Muslim Women, 156.