Begum Rokeya: A Muslim Feminist Who Dared to Dream
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain(1880-1932), is considered to be a pioneer of women’s awakening in South Asia, especially for Muslim girls. Her strong perspective on gender roles in society, women’s empowerment and rights, thirst for empowering women can also be found through her writings, right from Pipasa (Thirst, 1902)”, Sultana’s Dream, Padmarag (Essence of the Lotus, novel, 1924), Motichur (String of Sweet Pearls) (1904), a collection of essays with feminist perspective. She engaged in writing for more than three decades in both Bengali and English ranging from poetry, fiction, polemical essays, satires and journalistic pieces. Her writings can be considered as a major contribution at the time when feminist discourse was at the periphery.
This wonderful radical change-maker was born on 9th December 1880 in the village of Pairabond in Rangpur district in a very aristocratic, conservative Muslim family. It was a time where only boys were recipients of modern education and girls were allowed only traditional home education. She was critical of the strict veil system that was followed at the time and expressed this in her writings. In her novel Abarodhbasini (The Secluded Women, 1931), which is a reflection of women’s status in society at the time she narrates an incident in a story, which depicts the extreme nature of the purdah system of the time: A house catches fire and a female character in the story, a housewife, collects all the ornaments in a box and tries to run out of the burning house. On her way out, when she sees men at the door trying to put the fire off, instead of asking them for help, she chooses to go back into the burning house as she is not veiled.
Begum Rokeya was a knowledge-seeker. Her passion for learning and gaining knowledge convinced her siblings to teach her ‘English’ and ‘Bengali’. She got married, in 1897, to Syed Sakhawat Hossain, who was a deputy magistrate at the time. Her husband not only encouraged her to pursue her education further but also supported her immensely, in various ways, and she was able to establish her very first school, Sakhawat Memorial School, in 1909, with the aim of educating Muslim girls. To encourage and convince the parents of young Muslim girls to educate them, she went from house to house to talk to them. After the death of her husband in 1908, and a dispute with her in-laws, she left Bhagalpur in 1910 and went to Calcutta.
On March 16, 1911, the school was reestablished in Waliullah Lane No. 13 of Calcutta, for the first time in a house with eight students. It was shifted to many different addresses and finally found its permanent address in Lord Sinha Road in Kolkata.The fact that she was way ahead of her times, where even pursuing basic education seemed like a luxury, finds semblance in the courses of her school, which included physical as well as vocational trainings in order to assist women with financial independence.
In 1916, Begum Rokeya founded the Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e-Islam (Islamic Women’s Association), another one of her organisational contributions to Bengali Muslim women at the time. Through this initiative, she offered financial and educational support to marginalised Muslim women while also working on larger issues of the rights of Muslim women. In 1926, when she was asked to preside over the Bengal Women’s Education Conference convened in Kolkata, the first significant attempt to bring women together in support of women’s educational rights, known to use humour and satire to criticise Muslim women’s role in society, she said , “Although I am grateful to you for the respect that you have expressed towards me by inviting me to preside over the conference, I am forced to say that you have not made the right choice. I have been locked up in the socially oppressive iron casket of porda (purdah) for all my life. I have not been able to mix very well with people – as a matter of fact, I don’t even know what is expected of a chairperson. I do not know if one is supposed to laugh, or to cry.”
Her unfinished essay The Women’s Right is a living proof of her tireless work. She was engaged continuously in debates and conferences addressing the advancement of women, until her death. Her writings divulge the prejudices of society, the need for women’s education and the injustices that happened to them.
A realisation, that without education women’s empowerment, their voice can’t be established made Begum Rokeya determined from her childhood.
A dream that one day Begum Rokeya started with five students is now seen as a wave in Bangladesh. According to some statistics, the participation of girls is higher than that of boys in the primary level and the participation is equal in the junior level.
In Bangladesh the contribution of women is now noticeable at all levels, from information technology, research, business, administration to politics. No one had imagined this progress over100 years ago, when Begum Rokeya had started sowing the seeds of women’s empowerment and education. At present, many public universities in Bangladesh have a women’s hall in her name. There is also a public university in her birth place, Rangpur named after her.
Bangladesh observes Rokeya Day, on 9th December every year, to commemorate her work and legacy. On this day, the Bangladesh government also confers Begum Rokeya Padak on individual women for their exceptional achievement. Rokeya Begum was ranked number 6 in BBC’s poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time in the year 2004.
References:
- ∙Mohammad Quayum, 2013, The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). Hotei Publishing, IDC publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
- Niaz Zaman, A Feminist Foremother : Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,
https://www.thedailystar.net/book-reviews/feminist-foremother-critical-essays-rokeya sakhawat-hossain-1462744
- Begum Rokeya: The forgotten 19th Century feminist
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-india-53944724
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum_Rokeya
- http://archive.thedailystar.net/2004/04/16/d4041601066.htm
- BEGUM ROKEYA, BENGALI FEMINIST WRITER AND SOCIAL REFORMER
https://peoplepill.com/people/roquia-sakhawat-hussain/
- Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
http://guerrillagirlsbroadband.com/broads/begum-rokeya-sakhawat-hossain
- Suman Quazi, How begum Rokeya- India’s first Begum Muslim Feminist- dared women to dream
https://www.dailyo.in/variety/begum-rokeya-sakhawat-hossain-muslim-women-feminist-sultana-dream/story/1/19620.html
- My hero Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/28/rokeya-sakhawat-hossain-hero-tahmima-anam
- Girls ahead of boys in pass rate
https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/Girls-ahead-of-boys-in-pass-rate
(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. Content can be used with due credit to the author and to Zariya: Women’s Alliance for Dignity and Equality)
Farheen Masfiqua Malek, from Dhaka, Bangladesh, holds a dual graduate degree, one in Business Management and another in disaster management from University of Dhaka. Her work with vulnerable communities furthered her understanding of gender based violence, women’s empowerment and justice. Her engagement in the ongoing refugee response was both in emergency management and in the protection sector. Farheen is also an alumni member of the Justice Based Approach community (a community that is focused on justice based approaches in the development and humanitarian sector). It is her ambition and desire to continue to work in the development/humanitarian field.
