Sultana's Dream Read online

  “Nearly all the men had gone out to fight; even a boy of sixteen was not left home. Most of our warriors were killed, the rest driven back, and the enemy came within twenty-five miles of the capital.

  “A meeting of a number of wise ladies was held at the Queen’s palace to advise [as] to what should be done to save the land.

  “Some proposed to fight like soldiers; others objected and said that women were not trained to fight with swords and guns, nor were they accustomed to fighting with any weapons. A third party regretfully remarked that they were hopelessly weak of body.

  “If you cannot save your country for lack of physical strength, said the Queen, try to do so by brain power.

  “There was a dead silence for a few minutes. Her Royal Highness said again, ‘I must commit suicide if the land and my honor are lost.’

  “Then the Lady Principal of the second university (who had collected sun heat), who had been silently thinking during the consultation, remarked that they were all but lost; and there was little hope left for them. There was, however, one plan [that] she would like to try, and this would be her first and last effort; if she failed in this, there would be nothing left but to commit suicide. All present solemnly vowed that they would never allow themselves to be enslaved, no matter what happened.

  “The Queen thanked them heartily, and asked the Lady Principal to try her plan.

  “The Lady Principal rose again and said, ‘Before we go out the men must enter the zenanas. I make this prayer for the sake of purdah.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ replied Her Royal Highness.

  “On the following day the Queen called upon all men to retire into zenanas for the sake of honor and liberty.

  “Wounded and tired as they were, they took that order rather for a boon! They bowed low and entered the zenanas without uttering a single word of protest. They were sure that there was no hope for this country at all.

  “Then the Lady Principal with her two thousand students marched to the battlefield, and arriving there directed all the rays of the concentrated sun light and heat toward the enemy.

  “The heat and light were too much for them to bear. They all ran away panic-stricken, not knowing in their bewilderment how to counteract that scorching heat. When they fled away leaving their guns and other ammunitions of war, they were burned down by means of the same sun heat.

  “Since then no one has tried to invade our country any more.”

  “And since then your countrymen never tried to come out of the zenana?”

  “Yes, they wanted to be free. Some of the Police Commissioners and District Magistrates sent word to the Queen to the effect that the Military Officers certainly deserved to be imprisoned for their failure; but they [had] never neglected their duty and therefore they should not be punished, and they prayed to be restored to their respective offices.

  “Her Royal Highness sent them a circular letter, intimating to them that if their services should ever be needed they would be sent for, and that in the meanwhile they should remain where they were.

  “Now that they are accustomed to the purdah system and have ceased to grumble at their seclusion, we call the system mardana instead of zenana.”

  “But how do you manage,” I asked Sister Sara, “to do without the police or magistrates in case of theft or murder?”

  “Since the mardana system has been established, there has been no more crime or sin; therefore we do not require a policeman to find out a culprit, nor do we want a magistrate to try a criminal case.”

  “That is very good, indeed. I suppose if there were any dishonest person, you could very easily chastise her. As you gained a decisive victory without shedding a single drop of blood, you could drive off crime and criminals too without much difficulty!”

  “Now, dear Sultana, will you sit here or come to my parlor?” she asked me.

  “Your kitchen is not inferior to a queen’s boudoir!” I replied with a pleasant smile, “but we must leave it now; for the gentlemen may be cursing me for keeping them away from their duties in the kitchen so long.” We both laughed heartily.

  “How my friends at home will be amused and amazed, when I go back and tell them that in the far-off Ladyland, ladies rule over the country and control all social matters, while gentlemen are kept in the mardanas to mind babies, to cook, and to do all sorts of domestic work; and that cooking is so easy a thing that it is simply a pleasure to cook!”

  “Yes, tell them about all that you see here.”

  “Please let me know how you carry on land cultivation and how you plow the land and do other hard manual work.”

  “Our fields are tilled by means of electricity, which supplies motive power for other hard work as well, and we employ it for our aerial conveyances too. We have no railroad nor any paved streets here.”

  “Therefore neither street nor railway accidents occur here,” said I. “Do not you ever suffer from want of rainwater?” I asked.

  “Never since the ‘water balloon’ has been set up. You see the big balloon and pipes attached thereto. By their aid we can draw as much rainwater as we require. Nor do we ever suffer from flood or thunderstorms. We are all very busy making nature yield as much as she can. We do not find time to quarrel with one another as we never sit idle. Our noble Queen is exceedingly fond of botany; it is her ambition to convert the whole country into one grand garden.”

  “The idea is excellent. What is your chief food?”

  “Fruits.”

  “How do you keep your country cool in hot weather? We regard the rainfall in summer as a blessing from heaven.”

  “When the heat becomes unbearable, we sprinkle the ground with plentiful showers drawn from the artificial fountains. And in cold weather we keep our rooms warm with sun heat.”

  She showed me her bathroom, the roof of which was removable. She could enjoy a shower [or] bath whenever she liked, by simply removing the roof (which was like the lid of a box) and turning on the tap of the shower pipe.

  “You are a lucky people!” ejaculated I. “You know no want. What is your religion, may I ask?”

  “Our religion is based on Love and Truth. It is our religious duty to love one another and to be absolutely truthful. If any person lies, she or he is …”

  “Punished with death?”

  “No, not with death. We do not take pleasure in killing a creature of God—especially a human being. The liar is asked to leave this land for good and never to come to it again.”

  “Is an offender never forgiven?”

  “Yes, if that person repents sincerely.”

  “Are you not allowed to see any man, except your own relations?”

  “No one except sacred relations.”

  “Our circle of sacred relations is very limited, even first cousins are not sacred.”

  “But ours is very large; a distant cousin is as sacred as a brother.”

  “That is very good. I see Purity itself reigns over your land. I should like to see the good Queen, who is so sagacious and farsighted and who has made all these rules.”

  “All right,” said Sister Sara.

  Then she screwed a couple of seats on to a square piece of plank. To this plank she attached two smooth and well-polished balls. When I asked her what the balls were for, she said they were hydrogen balls and they were used to overcome the force of gravity. The balls were of different capacities, to be used according to the different weights desired to be overcome. She then fastened to the air-car two winglike blades, which, she said, were worked by electricity. After we were comfortably seated she touched a knob and the blades began to whirl, moving faster and faster every moment. At first we were raised to the height of about six or seven feet and then off we flew. And before I could realize that we had commenced moving, we reached the garden of the Queen.

  My friend lowered the air-car by reversing the action of the machine, and when the car touched the ground the machine was stopped and we got out.

  I had seen from the air-car the Queen walking o
n a garden path with her little daughter (who was four years old) and her maids of honor.

  “Halloo! you here!” cried the Queen, addressing Sister Sara. I was introduced to Her Royal Highness and was received by her cordially without any ceremony.

  I was very much delighted to make her acquaintance. In [the] course of the conversation I had with her, the Queen told me that she had no objection to permitting her subjects to trade with other countries. “But,” she continued, “no trade was possible with countries where the women were kept in the zenanas and so unable to come and trade with us. Men, we find, are rather of lower morals and so we do not like dealing with them. We do not covet other people’s land, we do not fight for a piece of diamond though it may be a thousandfold brighter than the Koh-i-Noor,* nor do we grudge a ruler his Peacock Throne.** We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems [that] Nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy Nature’s gifts as much as we can.”

  After taking leave of the Queen, I visited the famous universities, and was shown over some of their factories, laboratories, and observatories.

  After visiting the above places of interest, we got again into the air-car, but as soon as it began moving I somehow slipped down and the fall startled me out of my dream. And on opening my eyes, I found myself in my own bedroom still lounging in the easy chair!

  *The Koh-i-Noor (“mountain of light”) is the name of a large and exceptionally brilliant diamond in the possession of the Mughal rulers of India, currently part of the British Crown Jewels. To Indians, it is a symbol of great wealth.

  **The Peacock Throne is a famous jewel-encrusted throne built for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, also known for the Taj Mahal. It was carried away from Delhi by the Persian invader Nadir Shah. Its current location is the cause of much speculation. Many think that one of the thrones displayed in the Istanbul Museum is the Peacock Throne. It is a long-standing symbol of royal power and splendor to Indians.

  The Secluded Ones: Purdah Observed

  Roushan Jahan

  I REMEMBER MY INTRODUCTION to The Secluded Ones clearly, like a vivid dream. I was playing with my younger sister while my mother was reading to her own sister. They seemed to be very absorbed in the book. I started to listen and presently found that the story was about a woman who wore something called a burqa (a kind of clothing I had never heard of) and who fell on a railway track. With mounting horror and disbelief I learned that her maid would not let anyone help her up, and finally she was run over by a train. My child’s mind, reared on stories of miraculous rescues of persons in danger by heroes dashing in in the nick of time, found the grim ending totally unacceptable. “How could the stupid maid let the poor woman die like that? Why did the fools not do something to lift her up?” I burst forth, no longer able to contain my anger, which swiftly followed the first shock of horror. My mother, considerably startled, began to say something. But my sister, perceiving herself neglected, started crying. In the ensuing confusion, my queries got lost. Soon, the natural resilience of a child’s mind prevailed and the gruesome story was put aside, apparently forgotten.

  Years later, when I reread the story, the same thrill of horror and anger swept me, but this time pity was mingled in. Now, I was a child no longer. While I had never worn a burqa, I had seen people wearing them. I knew much more about purdah, the various ways of observing purdah, the need to maintain purdah—in short, all the things that a young woman growing up in Bangladesh (at that time, East Pakistan) needed to familiarize herself with. Though the severity of purdah practices experienced by Rokeya and her contemporaries can only be imagined by someone like me who is removed in time, the emotions that compelled her to write about the experience are bound to affect present-day readers very strongly. One is even thankful that though Rokeya herself described seclusion as “a silent killer like Carbon monoxide gas,”1 she did not consent to rot in seclusion in silence. Like Dylan Thomas, who urged his dying parent to “rage against the dying of the light,” Rokeya urged her sisters to rage and come out of darkness.

  The Secluded Ones (Avarodhbasini in Bengali), a collection of forty-seven anecdotes documenting purdah customs (Muslim and Hindu) all over North India, was first serialized in 1929 in the well-known Bengali periodical the Monthly Mohammadi, and later collected and published as a book. It was the first book of its kind to be written in Bangla by a Bengali Muslim woman. There had been quite a few books and articles written in Bangla depicting life in the zenana (women’s secluded quarters) in India. Recent scholarship has located some writings by Bengali Hindu women themselves, describing the suffocating conditions of their lives. But most of these are autobiographical in nature—journals, diaries, letters, and memoirs—and their tone is intensely personal.2 Authors like Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Sharat Chandra Chatterjee (1876–1938) had written about life in the zenana in many of their novels and short stories. Their scenes reflect great sensibility, keen observation, and even sympathy for women, but they are fragmentary and incidental to the plot. Rokeya’s The Secluded Ones, on the other hand, is strictly nonfiction reportage; its purpose is to present authentic incidents highlighting the absurdity of the extreme seclusion imposed on the women of North India, particularly Bengali Muslim women.

  The reports from The Secluded Ones reprinted here expose excesses of seclusion, presented sometimes with humor, sometimes with pain. They not only present the purdah customs then prevalent; they also show the attitude of the men and women of purdah-observing families. The attitude of non-purdah-observing persons toward purdah is also made clear. Above all, the attitude of Rokeya herself runs as a leitmotiv through these selections, and throughout the entire book. Rokeya did not pretend to be impartial. She selected incidents that exposed

  the ridiculous, the absurd, the horrible, and the tragic aspects of purdah observance. It is important to consider the historical context when reading these reports; they cannot be used to describe present reality.

  The fact that purdah and status were closely connected is demonstrated by the fact that the maids in purdah-observing families were allowed a much greater mobility and visibility than their mistresses. The rules were flexible and could be bent to suit the needs of the elite. That the degree of purdah observance of their own women depended on the “purdahlessness” of another class of women did not seem to be paradoxical to the elites, both Muslim and Hindu, of the time. The significance of this paradox seems to have eluded the notice of Rokeya also. In this she was a child of her time and class.

  The real value of The Secluded Ones lies in the fact that it shows that, in spite of everything, not all women submitted to purdah willingly or gladly. Many resisted, trying to assert their individuality. They even resented the fact that they had no control over their fates or lives. The rejection of strict seclusion by Rokeya herself shows that, no matter how strict, seclusion could not always smother a woman’s quest for development and fulfillment.

  It is in revealing this that The Secluded Ones differs from other accounts of Indian zenana life, particularly those written by foreign women, mostly British and American, who visited India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some foreigners, like Mary Frances Billington, were honest to detail, but they viewed the zenana life from a distance.3 Their glimpses were necessarily brief and cursory. Even an Englishwoman who married an Indian Muslim, Mrs. Meer Hassan Ali, did not fully perceive the conflict women in purdah might feel. Even though she lived for many years as a member of an Indian household and made many visits to women in their zenanas, she felt that they were quite resigned to the restrictions of purdah.4 Rokeya’s accounts are fuller. Katherine Mayo’s reaction to purdah, while as indignant as Rokeya’s, was again quite limited.5 Her prejudices were too strong; her pro-British and anti-Indian political views too pronounced.

  Rokeya, on the other hand, had the advantage of belonging to the culture. Yet her exposure to Western culture through education and association gave her the necessary intellectual d
etachment to view purdah, particularly among Muslims, from a different perspective.

  Rokeya’s critical and derogatory presentation of purdah caused quite a stir in Bengal. Many readers, not familiar with purdah customs and the deliberate manipulation of religious laws, were shocked. Many conservative Muslims, on the other hand, were angry. Most Muslims, however, were embarrassed. Some even resented this revelation of what had so far been private. Magazines and periodicals, especially those run by the Muslims, like the Mohammadi, carried angry letters. She had previously been accused by Muslims of “whipping” her society and of lending credence to and being unduly influenced by the severely critical and condescending pamphlets issued by the Christian Tract society in Madras. As one irate critic put it, “to her everything Indian is bad and everything Euro-American is good.”6 The reports in The Secluded Ones were too unflattering and hard to accept. The Muslims, priding themselves on their comparatively liberal laws concerning the status of women, had so far been condescending to the Hindus. That there had been a real change in the situation and status of Hindu women wrought by the sociocultural reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that in the 1920s Hindu women were not as disadvantaged as they had been earlier, seemed to have escaped their notice. They seemed unaware of the gap between the status de facto and the status de jure of their own women. This inability to perceive the social realities was reflected in the fact that even the scathing remarks of Katherine Mayo did not upset them, for they felt that her barbs were marked for the Hindus only. Rokeya, however, was saying the same things about the Muslims. Her own unveiling of the hidden face of Mother India concerned the Muslims directly. A few of them tried to discredit Rokeya by treating The Secluded Ones as fictitious. In the words of one critic: “The readers would have been happy if the respected author had not presented us with these fictions and fables in the name of discrediting seclusion.”7