A century on, Begum Rokeya’s feminist science fiction is still inspiring Indian artists

In a 2021 article for The Caravan, Devangana Kalita, a member of the women’s collective Pinjra Tod jailed in relation to the 2020 Delhi riots under a draconian law, shared her drawing featuring women swimming among fish with their fists raised sto the sun in a gesture of political resistance. The work was inspired by the illustrations of artist Durgabai Vyam, in the Pradhan Gond style, for a story called Sultana’s Dream: “We had a reading session of the story in our barrack one night,” writes Kalita in a letter published in the article. “It felt special, warm and familiar…”

What was this old tale that inspired and heartened Kalita, an activist who is part of a movement seeking to liberate women from patriarchal fetters like curfews, confinement and surveillance in the name of safety and security? How does it appear to have become reactivated in contemporary Indian visual culture? And what does this reactivation tell us about the times we live in, seemingly distant from the historical moment of the story’s origin?

Written in 1905 by a Bengali educator and reformer called Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain or Begum Rokeya, Sultana’s Dream is the first known example of feminist science-fiction by a non-white writer. Straddling the lines between satire and manifesto, the short story was first published in a Madras-based magazine called The Indian Ladies Magazine.

A utopian fantasy, Sultana’s Dream opens with the titular protagonist being led by a mysterious woman she calls Sister Sara to a world called Ladyland, in which the traditional realms of zenana and mardana have been transposed: it is men who stay indoors and attend to the domestic duties of kitchen and nursery, whilst women are leaders in public life as magistrates, educators, legislators and scientists who anticipate solar harvesting, cloud seeding and hydrogen-powered aircrafts. The socio-cultural transformations imagined in the text are articulated through prescient critiques not only of patriarchy but of co-constitutive systems of oppression that feminism resists, such as the industrial exploitation of ecology, the capitalist labour process, the militarisation of borders and police systems, theocracy and imperialism.

Over the past few years, there has been a spurt of visual adaptations of Sultana’s Dream across various media and formats. For four contemporary visual artists engaging with the story, Begum Rokeya’s far-sighted vision lends itself to thinking about utopia in a way that critiques the present not only – as the original text does – by evoking a seemingly impossible future, but revealing how the past persists and prevails.

Dystopian reality

Made over a period of three years and released in 2018, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh’s eponymous series of dichromatic linoleum prints interprets Begum Rokeya’s narrative as a sequence of 27 retrofuturistic scenes. She too cites the Tara Books publication comprising Vyam’s illustrations as her first encounter with a visual version of the story. Over the course of production, Ganesh started to contrast the dystopian reality around her with Ladyland: “I was working on it while many other things happened in the world, including the election of Trump, the protests at the first round of brutalising students at JNU, obviously NRC and CAA…so a lot of things antithetical to the foundational elements of this story, namely that there’s a lot more emphasis on structures that enable just governance rather than a focus on individual leaders and their charisma and power, which is what we are seeing in the authoritarian turn.”

Political protests were on Hina Saiyada’s mind as she developed Ladyland or Kai’s Dream (2021), an open world, first-person shooter video game. Ladyland’s protagonist, a young filmmaker called Kai, is in hospital at the start of the game. “The idea is that she was injured at an anti CAA-NRC protest actually,” affirming the “link between Ladyland, Sultana’s Dream and the protests in India that were led by women,” said Saiyada.

The head of gaming at a Goa-based media production company, Saiyada first came across Sultana’s Dream as a Delhi University student, after which “it kind of got buried” and forgotten. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Saiyada was in Kolkata, that she returned to it and started appreciating the story’s focus on the emancipatory potential of technology, its equitable relationship to nature and the way it queers the traditional domestic-public dichotomy. She felt stimulated to create something immersive enough to suit the dynamic possibilities opened up by the original text: “What does one do with it? And how does one really take it further into a reality? Because, in some ways, it’s still very ahead of our times.”

Whilst thoughts of the present and the future propelled these two adaptations of Sultana’s Dream, for others it served as a framing device to look at the past through a feminist lens. Goa-based Afrah Shafiq’s interactive multimedia work titled Sultana’s Reality (2017) “explores”, in the artist’s own words, “the inner lives of the first generation of women to be educated in pre-independent India…through animated video, graphics, gif’s [sic], comics, collages and other digital art forms made by collating, re-mixing, re-interpreting and re-imagining traditional visual imaginations of the female form”. Subtly acknowledging Begum Rokeya’s actual reformist legacy in the title, Shafiq drew not on the narrative contents of her story but on its thematic advocacy of women’s education. She explained, “The work is not literally about Sultana’s Dream…but I was really interested in looking at how a text like this came about all those years back and what was the reality of that writer’s circumstance that aided in creating it.”

Recovering the marginalised history of women is also the impulse behind an eponymous animated short film co-directed by four members of a Bengaluru studio called Spitting Image – Sandhya Visvanathan, Aniriddh Menon, Shoumik Biswas and Aditya Bharadwaj. The film, made in 2022 and currently streaming on MUBI, was commissioned as part of an anthology called Lost Migration by Project Dastaan, an initiative that aims to build peace in South Asia. Based on a script by the organisation’s co-founder Saadia Gardezi, the film mobilises the subjunctive charge of Begum Rokeya’s story to convey not a feminist dream but the colonially-induced nightmare of the 1947 Partition of India, haunting an aged Sultana displaced from Dhaka to Calcutta during Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971.

Speaking about how Gardezi’s screenplay synthesised interviews of Partition survivors to retrieve their “untold histories and unspoken stories,” Visvanathan said, “Sultana’s Dream, the text, bookended those stories…it was the frame of reference with which we started looking at patriarchy and the systemic and structural violence, even family violence, not just that inflicted by the state.” She goes on to note that unlike most adaptations which feature Sultana as a young woman, “in this one it was an older woman because the story was about Partition survivors”.

Ecofeminist idyll

Given the layers of meaning these artists were engaging with, what were the formal strategies through which they brought Sultana’s Dream to life visually?

Ganesh and Saiyada based their imagery on references and descriptions in the original text. To create the infrastructures mentioned in Begum Rokeya’s story, Ganesh turned to vernacular architecture of the subcontinent – the Somapura Mahavira was the basis for Ladyland’s all-women university, the Siddi Saiyyed Mosque’s jaali adumbrated its zenana and the baoli or stepwell was a manifestation of the rainwater harvesting its lady scientists devised. The Goa-inspired solarpunk infrastructure of Saiyada’s Ladyland/Kai’s Dream video game included a cane “solar crystal” energy generator, a seed bank/community reservoir in the shape of a yoni and the presence of hydrogen cars.

Shafiq and Spitting Image adopted a more oblique approach to Sultana’s Dream in their works. For Shafiq, the most useful structure was the text’s narrative one: “It uses the title Sultana’s Reality and it’s structured like the story in the sense that it opens with ‘One day I was lounging about in my easy chair and thinking about the state of womanhood…’ which is the opening of the story. And then we slip into a dream and the rest of the project happens.” In the animated short film, the Spitting Image directorial team used colour to evoke Ladyland. Visvanathan explained, “The first half, specifically the part about Sultana’s Dream [set at night], we chose a blue, washed in this evening or nighttime glow because we were trying to show women out in the street and women occupying public spaces, almost like they’re taking a nighttime walk in an open space.”

Hints of Begum Rokeya’s ecofeminist idyll appear – a greenhouse, a giant windmill, rain harnessing technology – but the filmmakers were more invested in the overarching philosophy of the work. Menon said, “One of the things we kept in mind was to not have a very machine-y looking future. It was a future centred around people and that was really important to us.”

Through these idiosyncratic futurities throbbed an archival impulse, for no future can be ahistorical. In Shafiq’s Sultana’s Reality, we encounter excerpts from late colonial texts that deal with Indian women’s rights, both reformist and reactionary, as well as heterogeneous assemblages quoting different visual genres from the 19th century. For their production of Sultana’s Dream, Spitting Image referenced Partition-era visual material such as photographs, illustrations, postcards and posters as well as the aesthetics of miniature painting. Ganesh modelled her linocut characters on real figures like the 1930s’ stuntwoman Nadia Wadia and swadeshi feminist activist Sarojini Naidu. The personal archive contributed too, especially in the incarnation of Sultana herself. Ganesh revealed, “The main figure of Sultana, who is basically like a school teacher living in Bengal, is actually based on my mother, who was also a school teacher who lived in Calcutta.”

For Saiyada, her protagonist bore a resemblance to Rokeya herself, brought into focus when she compared her famous photograph with one of her grandmother. “Rokeya’s childhood might have been a lot like my grandmother’s,” Saiyada said. “The way she’s standing, the way she looks in the sari is exactly like that, the way it’s draped feels familiar. So I felt like Kai was mirroring something of that in the way she stood. Rokeya always stood with her legs apart, my grandmother always stood with her legs apart.”

Observing their photographic portraits, Saiyada differentiates the posture of Begum Rokeya and her grandmother from what would then have been the hegemonic white colonial comportment of the “feminine” body during their day. The entwinement of anti-patriarchy and anticolonialism runs through Sultana’s Dream like a political nerve, setting it apart from other feminist science-fictional utopian texts of its time, written by white writers from Europe and North America who did not draw the necessary parallels between the subjugation of the gendered Other and the colonised Other. The mardana/zenana dichotomy was thus not a mere spatial metaphor but an indicator of a hierarchical organising principle, reflecting a complex system of interrelations between not just men and women, but empire and colony, industry and nature, capital and labour, and religious fundamentalism and secularist integration.

Symbolic zenana

But why has this text, written at a time when Indian women barely had any legal rights or social protections, experienced a quiet cultural revival in the present moment? What is the appeal of Ladyland?

Nearly 120 years since its debut, Begum Rokeya’s futuristic fable remains disappointingly relevant.

Far from realising the green techno-utopia she proposes, Indian women have not even been able to safely exit the symbolic zenana perennially girding their lives. In August, the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata sparked a series of “Reclaim the Night” protests across the nation (though in some iterations caste injustice negated feminist solidarity). Representing the right of women to autonomy and freedom, the proximity of the protests to India’s Independence Day on August 15 threw into question Indian women’s status as equal citizens in a substantive sense. In their civic fury, the demonstrations recall the last time righteous political anger was channelled into spontaneous, large-scale and continuous political organising, when Muslim Indian women led the charge against the Citizenship Amendment Act coupled with the National Register of Citizens.

Furthermore, the discourse on the matter of the Uniform Civil Code led by Muslim Indian feminists evinces the continued significance of the activism of reformers like Begum Rokeya, who founded the Muslim Women’s Association/Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e-Islam in 1916. As Kalita’s prison drawing suggests, across the span of a century, the dreams of a young Bengali Muslim woman are reverberating across agitations for equality and justice.

Ganesh linked the story to the student movement in Bangladesh. “If I’m not mistaken, one of the students who was shot was actually from Begum Rokeya University. So, I feel like it just continues to be more and more relevant for our world.”

There are other vexations. How do we revisit a utopia that seems to be premised on gender segregation, albeit with roles swapped? Would that not be reaffirming an essentialist view of gender and effacing the multiplicity of identities that have fought for recognition in the long 20th century?

Spitting Image’s Bharadwaj notes that the apparent “lack of men” could be seen as their film’s most direct correspondence to Begum Rokeya’s story. A world of purdah-nashin men merely transfers the supremacism of the mardana to the zanana, without demolishing the walls that constitute this binary architecture. While this made perfect sense in 1905, when the biggest hurdle for Indian women was transgressing the veil, the stakes and understandings of gender are different today. The artists address this in their interpretations of the text by incorporating gender nonconformity into the iconography of their protagonists and background characters, rendering them as nonbinary figures.

Contemporary artists are also aware of another axis of domination, that of caste. Ganesh said, “The science fiction genre allows for a much more syncretic vocabulary that doesn’t necessarily privilege received iconographic paradigms, for example, upper-caste Hindu ones. So that was also of interest to me was how I could evolve my visuality to meet some of the changing ways in which not only certain religious iconography and figuration is weaponised, but also to align it more with my own political thinking.”

Perhaps the work that most explicitly connects the text to current discourse on patriarchal violence in South Asia, with its religious majoritarianism and izzat-centric social feudalism, is Spitting Image’s Partition-themed Sultana’s Dream. Co-director Menon expressed delight at the opportunity to depict Begum Rokeya’s Ladyland, calling it “the silver lining because we had to represent a lot of atrocities”. This interplay between the utopian and the dystopian was theorised by writer Margaret Atwood as “ustopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other…what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don’t go to Heaven, they become thesis topics.”

Or perhaps they become works of contemporary art, able to cultivate, if only for a while, the fiction of another version of our world, even if marginally better one. As Menon said, “One of the more utopian things we thought we could depict right off the bat is women walking alone at night. We’re not asking much of our utopia.”