Pratiti Shirin writes for DOT
9th December marked the 138th birth anniversary of Roquia Sakhawat Hossain commonly known as Begum Rokeya. She has been identified as the most important educator for advancing the cause of women’s education in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal.
Born in an aristocratic family in a remote village in what was the district of Rangpur in undivided Bengal, she was taught English by her brother Ibrahim Saber in the dead of the night amidst candlelight and Bangla by her elder sister Karimunnessa who was a prominent poet of the time but who was married off at 13 as soon as her love for learning was discovered. Ibrahim is supposed to have told his sister if the latter could master the English language, the whole world’s knowledge would open up to her. Rokeya―like the rest of the Muslim women of her time―did not have the opportunity to go to school because of a complex socio-cultural construction of her time known as the purdah which required women to remain invisible to other women and men in the outside world at all costs. Her father Zahiruddin Muhammad Abu Ali Haidar Saber was a zamindar. He had married an English woman during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 despite the fact that he had a wife and children―Rokeya’s siblings. Rokeya at about 16 years of age was married off to Sakhawat Hossain who was a government official and double her age but who helped her obtain advanced education in English. Sakhawat had children from a former marriage so that by the time of his death, Rokeya was cut off from Sakhawat’s legal inheritance to which only the children from Sakhawat’s first marriage were entitled to as Rokeya had no living children. She was only 29 years old when he died.
What was Rokeya’s relation to her husband like? Although she never remarried (which was a possible taboo in Rokeya’s time), it is clear from one of her letters she wrote that she felt irritated by living with a man to whom she was rather a nurse than a wife in his last years. But it cannot be denied that the further education she received under his tutelage; absence of household responsibilities and children transformed her into the radical Rokeya whom history has remembered.
Sakhawat left Rokeya a large sum of money to open the Sakhawat Memorial Government Girls’ High School first established in Bhagalpur in 1909 and then shifted to Kolkata. Rokeya went from door to door to ask reluctant Muslim parents to send their girls to her school. Unlike Nawab Faizunnessa Chaudhurani who was her contemporary and who had opened the first boarding school for Muslim girls in Comilla, Rokeya was not elite; nor did she have any title like the former. Her only goodwill was her good family background which backed her up in securing powerful patrons of that time. The editor of the journal Mussalman was an influential political figure of Bengal at that time. His journal gave free publicity to Rokeya’s school, alluring parents of aristocratic Muslim families to send their daughters to school. Other magazines which supported Rokeya’s literary endeavours or her school at various times were Mohammadi, Saugat, Al-Islam, Bangiya Mussalman Sahitya Patrika, Nabanoor, Mahe-Nao, Dhumketu and Muezzin. These were all journals in which Rokeya wrote essays mainly during the latter phase of her life unequivocally upholding women’s various rights such as the right to go to school; right to earn one’s own income and right to be independent all of which were considered radical during her time. While running her school, Rokeya had to spend maximum expenses on airtight carriages which would carry the girls from home to school and vice versa. They were airtight in order to follow purdah. Some of these were so tight that girls fainted from time to time due to suffocation.
Rokeya’s educational vision is reflected in the novella Padmarag (Ruby). She believed in a functional aspect of education which would make her girls ready to face the outside world. In the school described in Padmarag, girls learn mathematics and English; how to grow and sell one’s vegetable and nursing among other things. To what extent these activities were implemented in her actual school she had set up, is subject to conjecture as Rokeya was required to follow the syllabus provided by the government for teaching girls was she to receive the government grant on which the Sakhawat Memorial heavily relied on. The government syllabus discouraged women from learning English or mathematics and focused on teaching activities like cooking, sewing; reading the Holy Quran and taking care of the home in order to make them eligible future housewives. But Rokeya’s vision for women was in direct conflict with the gender norms women were required to perform during her lifetime, making her one of the most outstanding voices of her time.
In many ways, Rokeya is a product of the Bengal Renaissance which was happening while she ushered into maturity. The Bengal Renaissance was a reformist project created by the British, with an aim to reform Indian society. It was a cultural and intellectual movement which soon drew in the leading figures of Bengal such as Debendranath Tagore, Ram Mohun Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Nawab Abdul Latif and Sir Syed Ahmed (Syed Ahmed Khan).
During Rokeya’s lifetime, the burning of the sati was banned; Sir Syed Ahmed started the first university in Kolkata for Muslim men and Nawab Abdul Latif established the Mohammedan Literary Society. Its goal was the promotion of modern western education among Muslims. It was the first association of its kind for Muslims in India. It was mainly the Brahmos/Hindus who were reaping the benefits of the Bengal Renaissance and it was due to the efforts of a few men like Syed Ahmed, Abdul Latif and Syed Ameer Ali that Muslim men saw some progress. But along with Nawab Faizunnessa and a few other women, it was Rokeya who played the most important role in promoting formal education among Muslim women in early twentieth century Bengal.
Rokeya was an apt heiress of the Bengal Renaissance but the radical voice through which she spoke was her own. Although best known for her utopian short story called ‘’Sultana’s Dream’’ which she first wrote in Bangla and then translated herself into English, it is mainly her essays that brought out her originality to the forefront at a time when even mentioning of women’s formal education was a taboo in Bengali Muslim society.
The writer is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh.