Sultana’s Dream & Padmarag—Bangladesh

Namaskar,

One of the first science-fiction utopian stories and one of the first feminist utopias by celebrated pioneering feminist, educator, activist, and Bengali writer Rokeya Hossain.

As a pioneering work of science fiction and feminist utopian literature at the turn of the century, Sultana's Dream is strikingly advanced in its critique of patriarchy, war, industrialization, and the exploitation of the natural world, speaking to the concerns of our contemporary world as much as its own. At a time when British colonialism was using the treatment of women in India as justification for colonial intervention there, Hossain's story, in imagining a world in which men rather than women are kept inside, positions her protest against Islamic patriarchy within a larger feminist vision that takes on Western as well as Islamic forms of gender hierarchy. Her novella Padmarag is similarly utopian in its depiction of a women-run school and welfare center, and is both feminist and anti-colonial in its outlook. In both these works, Hossain seizes the critique of gender roles in India away from Western commentators and turns it against British interference, while also enlarging the critique to take on the problem of gender more broadly.

We‘ll continue with our 2026 reading list:

4-The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China by Julia Lovell
5-Rickshaw Boy by Lao She—China
6-The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
7-One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—Colombia
8-How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
9-Heart of Darkness by Polish author Joseph Conrad—Congo
10-The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
11-Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi—Ghana
12-Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Enjoy Bangladesh!

Are you interested in reading fiction and non-fiction in French and Spanish, and Persian literature? Join me on:
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