Arup K. Chatterjee: Welcome ladies and gentlemen to this inaugural episode of The Unofficial Seminar. I am here joined by my friend Professor Dr. Amit Ranjan. Amit is a professor from NCERT. Amit, how have you been? What is happening?
Amit Ranjan: Hello Professor Dr. Arup K. Chatterjee, long time no see. I have been good. Hope you have been good too.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Right. So today we are going to discuss something quite close to our hearts, and that is this very uncanny short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and that is called “Sultana’s Dream.” So Amit, you have tall claims about “Sultana’s Dream,” and well, so do I. We have been discussing very uncanny examples of literature and cultural specimens for as long as I can remember, and “Sultana’s Dream” by Rokeya Hossain happens to be just one of them. But what an interesting example we have on our hands. It is written in 1905, ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes her work Herland, which is a novel. That was published in 1915, whereas “Sultana’s Dream,” a short story, gets published in 1905 and remains more or less in obscurity.
Amit Ranjan: Let me tell our viewers that the work is in English. It is not translated, for anybody who might think it is a translated work.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Precisely the point, and this is one of the elementary mistakes people make, because one of the critical characters in the story is Sister Sara. Given the complexity of Indian milieus, one very often thinks, is it really “sister,” is it “apa,” is it a translation of “didi,” “bon,” and so on. So it is not. It is a story, as you rightly said, written in the English language when Rokeya was, I think, hardly twenty-five. So Amit, you and I have discussed at length many uncanny specimens of the long nineteenth century and its impact on India. Your own doctoral dissertation on John Lang, your first non-fiction book, and your forthcoming work on Dara Shikoh all show how deeply the nineteenth century shaped intellectual lives. So with Rokeya Hossain, I suppose now, any initial thoughts on the story? When did you encounter “Sultana’s Dream” first, and what did it make you think about Indian history or the nineteenth century?
Amit Ranjan: I do not know when I encountered it first, probably in my undergraduate days, accidentally somewhere. My first thoughts were, oh my God, why is this not in the school curriculum, or why do we not know it. That is a pity, how geopolitics and political boundaries affect the boundaries of literature. It is as Indian as it gets, yet she is very well known in Bangladesh because she is from East Bengal, much like Kazi Nazrul Islam, who is from West Bengal, but still not widely known beyond Bengal. He got the citizenship of Bangladesh on his deathbed in the 1970s and is the national poet of Bangladesh, though he was Indian all his life. These are things to ponder, how politics also shapes the literary history. But anyway, talking just of this story, the first time I encountered it, it was mind-blowing. There is a whole history behind it. The first thing that was striking was the word “utopia,” when one learns that utopia actually means a society which is completely male and excludes women, starting with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in 1666. That is where the tradition starts, and all subsequent male writers write about such utopias until Mary Shelley puts a break to it, probably around 1819. Mary Shelley, wife of Percy Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, responds to that tradition. Thomas More had earlier written Utopia on similar lines. So this becomes, in a way, writing back to the father. Frankenstein is seen for many things, but the most important thing is that it presents an artificially produced human being made out of body parts by a man, with no woman involved. What kind of a society does that lead to? Even though it is like a baby created through artificial technology, he is hated and treated like a monster. It suggests what male psychology might produce if the world were entirely male. Mary Shelley is profound with Frankenstein, and almost a hundred years later, in 1905, we have Rokeya Hossain, who goes further into science fiction and asserts a women’s utopia in “Sultana’s Dream,” where men have voluntarily imprisoned themselves because they can no longer deal with the stress of the world. The women in Rokeya’s world are remarkable. There are new ideas, such as not fighting with guns and swords but fighting by deflecting the sun’s rays onto the enemy, which also implies ethical practices of fighting only during the day, something lost by the early twentieth century. The women fight, they cook, they bring up children. The men’s purpose is reduced largely to procreation. One of the most striking points in “Sultana’s Dream” is that women work only two hours instead of eight, because men smoke and gossip for the remaining six hours. That statement still seems to hold true.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yes, I mean, fascinating. So, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, were known for their very egalitarian principles and their vindication of the rights of women as early as the eighteenth century. Frankenstein clearly establishes a genealogical link between itself and “Sultana’s Dream.” Now, guilty as you and I are, Amit, of trying to trace what may have inspired literary authors to historical or textual correlates in other kinds of literature, Frankenstein is one such example. I was recently telling my students that there is also a considerable impact of Gulliver’s Travels, particularly in its caricature of the Royal Society. It is not caricatured in “Sultana’s Dream,” but taken quite seriously. The reflectors, the sunbeams, and the harnessing of solar energy seem to have been prefigured by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.
Amit Ranjan: Swift, of course, is a genius, and he had tremendous influence on later writers in terms of imagination. During this period, literature mirrors science. Frankenstein reflects developments in electricity, while “Sultana’s Dream” speaks of solar power and even flying machines. There are no roads in that imagined world, only gardens, and solar-powered aerial vehicles move about. This also raises the relationship between women and science. Men tend to view science as exploitative of the earth. In New Atlantis, there is a sense of conquest, of drilling into the earth, which also carries a deep sexual innuendo. From the seventeenth century onward, the earth becomes feminised in the Western canon, and science is imagined as a means of domination. Women, however, seem to imagine science very differently.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yes, and I was also discussing recently a fascinating part of nineteenth-century history, particularly a branch of Indian intellectual life that has been somewhat neglected, associated with Annie Besant and before her Helena Blavatsky. How do we characterise someone like Blavatsky? Is she a science enthusiast or entirely anti-science? Is she a philistine? I would say she is the former. She speaks of spirits and ghosts, which might seem transgressive, yet she takes science seriously, though she does not see it as exploitative in the way someone like Charles Darwin might. For Darwin, science becomes almost a secular scripture. Blavatsky, however, offers a more expansive vision.
Amit Ranjan: What later came to be called social Darwinism aligned quite seamlessly with missionary activity, even though initially there appeared to be tension. Over time, these strands merged, and Darwinists today often distinguish between social Darwinism and scientific Darwinism. At the same time, one must remember that science keeps changing its definitions. In the nineteenth century, phrenology was a major discipline, considered as important as the telegraph in the 1850s. For viewers, phrenology is the study of the skull. It was believed that the structure of the skull could reveal personality traits, much like palmistry reads lines on the hand. The cerebrum was thought to map onto the inner skull, which then shaped the outer skull. By studying the outer skull, one could supposedly determine criminality, genius, and other traits. This field was very influential, as was spiritualism, which involved communicating with spirits. John Lang wrote about both phrenology and spiritualism in his newspaper, The Mofussilite, as did other contemporary papers like the Delhi Gazette and Hurkaru. Spiritualism involved calling upon spirits, beckoning them into presence. There was even a judge, Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson, who wrote a book on communicating with spirits from the time of Julius Caesar up to his own era. So science keeps changing how the world understands it. Students should recognise that what is considered science today may not remain so a hundred years later.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Exactly. What we call the STEM field today still suffers from a gender imbalance, being heavily tilted towards men. Historically, this has roots in how science was shaped.
Amit Ranjan: Women, from Mary Shelley to Rokeya Hossain, imagined science differently. Patriarchal structures controlling science and technology would naturally resist alternative visions, preferring a standard exploitative model. This may explain why women were discouraged from entering such fields, often told that they lacked the intellectual capacity, reinforced by theories like phrenology.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Exactly. And this is something Rokeya Hossain also touches upon in “Sultana’s Dream.” Women may have smaller brains, it is said, but then elephants have larger brains than humans, yet they do not rule the earth. Humans do. Therefore, women might as well govern the human realm. That is the satirical force of “Sultana’s Dream.” Now I wanted to sort of test the grounds of what actually informs “Sultana’s Dream” other than Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein, and any other canonical Western model of literature that Rokeya Hossain must have read. She was encouraged by her husband to read. She picked up English and Bangla through her own reading. She was not tutored in Bengali and English, as you know, and she was writing fantastically well at the age of twenty-five, judging from “Sultana’s Dream.” So I have hazarded some informed speculations. I have tried to locate the trajectory of Indian writing in the nineteenth century. In my book Indians in London and in the subsequent papers I wrote, Amit, I found that a lot of Indians were travelling to London and Europe, and writing about these spaces was becoming a kind of literature. It was becoming a kind of quasi-anthropological activity. I know that is an over-glamorisation, but these writings did have a good deal of impact. There was a lady, a Hindu lady as she called herself, living in Madras, a Telugu speaker. Her name was Pothum Janakummah Raghaviah, and she published in 1876 what is, to my mind, the first Indian woman’s travel account in English. She writes it as Pictures of England, and I have written a paper on that too. She calls London “fairyland,” and men used to call London “dreamland.” Now I have sensed that there are uncanny correlations between fairyland and dreamland and Ladyland of Rokeya Hossain. So Ladyland is in some parts derived from London because of the obvious link that Ladyland has a sovereign who is the queen, and women feel very safe in Ladyland, exactly like they would feel in London. London was a capitalist haven. It was mesmerising, thanks to the Crystal Palace exhibition of the 1850s. And Sister Clara lives in Darjeeling, so we do not exactly know whether the other character that Sultana meets in the dream is Sister Clara, or her lookalike, or thinkalike. But the fact that she superimposes Sister Clara’s image onto this other character signifies that Sister Clara is surely not Indian. To me that is very clear. Sister Clara is English. That is my informed speculation. But you were telling me before we started that you have a slightly different theory.
Amit Ranjan: Yeah, right. So first of all, let me try to counter the idea of London, given that Charles Dickens represented so much poverty of London, a dirty city, and so with the Romantic poets who take refuge in the Lake District and so on, do not like the city. So of course the Indian visitors may have a different view of London, but the Londoners themselves, and both of these views were available in India to read. So that is one thing, what might have influenced. One does not know. My theory is an Australian theory, which is also why Rokeya Hossain was writing in English. So this is a very interesting story. The girls in South Australia, South Australia was the second penal colony after New South Wales. New South Wales is Sydney and so on. South Australia is where all the coal was found, and later uranium, Adelaide and so on. So this became a big colony, and all the free people from England settled over there and employed all the convict labour. So it was a very labour-intensive place. And the girls growing up there were wild. They were not like Victorian women. They were riding horses, scout girls, let us say. And we know how Victorian England was. There was a discipline of home science or finishing school to groom girls into becoming good sociable, snobbish girls that they were supposed to faint on listening to bad news and get revived by smelling salts and so on. They had to have a perfect figure. They had to know the ballroom dance and so on. So finishing school was very important. And the South Australian girls were no good at any of this. So it caused a lot of anxiety to their parents. So they were sent back home. Home for Australia was London, of course. And these girls went through Colombo and Bombay, and many of these girls would run away with Indian men in India. By Indian men you mean British people who were in Indian royalty, Indian princes. For example, the king of something was king of Mandvi and Gujarat. At least three Melbourne girls who became royalty in India, and that is much later in the early twentieth century, but during the nineteenth century this was happening. So then this became another problem because there is mixing of the conqueror and the conquered, but it is the conquering men and conquered women, not the other way around. So this was happening the other way around. So in that anxiety they decided to make nuns out of these girls instead of letting them run away with Indian men. So they opened the South Australian Baptist Women’s Mission in Pune and in Bengal. So in one of the recorded meetings of the Baptist Mission of Pune, out of 150 members, an overwhelming 90 percent majority was women. So these girls were not allowed to interact with Indian men lest they run away with them. So they were allowed to interact only in the zenana, the women’s quarters. And so in Bengal, because Muslim society had clearly marked zenanas, they were allowed to interact in the zenana. And suddenly you see Muslim women learning English instead of Bengali. I mean, sure, they were proficient in Bengali as well, but they learned English. And I think Rokeya Khatun is of that line, and Sister Clara that she is alluding to is somebody from the South Australian Baptist mission that she is alluding to. And also in terms of ideas, the Victorian sensibility, even in the most progressive, rebellious writers of the time like Jane Austen, is very muffled, very miffed. So probably it is the Australian women who had these bold ideas, and that is what gets translated, and of course mixed with, not to take away from her own agency of course, the Indian freedom struggle itself, which was gaining momentum, and Bengal being the hub of it had Partition in 1905. So it is her own ideas plus what might have been the influence of the South Australian missionaries in Bengal.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Well, I see there is a lot to agree with there. I was just looking at the literary production of “Sultana’s Dream,” how it was published, where it was published. But before I say more, let me tell you which are the parts that excite me and which I definitely agree with. So I think both you and I believe that Sister Clara is clearly not Indian and she is part of some mission. My initial guess was that she was Catholic, or perhaps Irish Catholic, or Protestant, Presbyterian, or you know, she was based in Darjeeling, which also reminds me, Amit, there was a very robust Australian mission in Mussoorie and Dehradun, do you think? That was during the first quarter of the twentieth century, I think. Mussoorie and Dehradun are also one of our sites of crime, which we will visit some day hopefully. So Sister Clara, somebody based in Darjeeling, I thought she was Irish Catholic or Protestant. You are saying she is part of the Australian Baptist mission. Clearly she is a missionary, and it is because of that missionary influence that Rokeya Hossain has acquired English language skills, also because of her husband Sakhawat Hossain, who was a deputy magistrate. Now this was published in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905, which is in Madras, and it was that that led me to think that maybe she was accessing copies of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, maybe this periodical was subscribed to by her husband or by people she was in touch with. These are all valid speculations. Her husband submits a story through the magistrate, through his boss, and the boss then sends the story for publication to the Indian Ladies’ Magazine. And it was that Indian Ladies’ Magazine connection, the Madras connection, that made me create that link between Rokeya Hossain and Pothum Janakummah Raghaviah of thirty years earlier, from 1876. That does not discount the fact that there was a multi-pronged missionary presence in and around Rokeya, and what is true for the goose is also true for the gander. So what is true for Australian Baptist missionary women may be equally true for Catholic women, let us say.
Amit Ranjan: I disagree slightly on that, because the Australian missionary women are unwilling participants in the whole thing. They are these girls who must be tamed and are somehow over there. So they have their wild ideas still of rebellion. Whereas somebody coming from England or Ireland would be more cowed down, more mellow. They would not have, or more strategic, or far more strategic.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yes, and far more strategic and sharp.
Amit Ranjan: There is a matter of strategy in this short story too, which is to frame it as a dream.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Exactly.
Amit Ranjan: Just like Sultana’s story, but it is framed as a dream. And when the dream breaks, it is just left with a sigh that someday I know it is a beautiful dream and so on. It is framed as a dream as part of a strategy to avoid censorship, that the magazine may not reject it, saying it is outrageous and so on.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Does it not strike you as a parallel with Queen Victoria, the idea of Sultana? Sultana is a very playful name. It is a non-threatening name. Sultana is sovereign, parallel.
It is an Indian reply to the Victorian queen, and a continuum of the past as well, of Razia Sultana for example. Of what women are capable of in the East, as opposed to the queen in the West.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Very interesting. So you are suggesting that Ladyland is not a Western construct.
Amit Ranjan: It may have the pallor of it, it may have the framing of it, but the agency part of it, of “I am the Sultana,” is in opposition to “you are the queen.” I am the Sultana with a new dream, and you are the queen of the old world.
Arup K. Chatterjee: But is it not the queen who rules Ladyland? And is it not the queen who has created this new structure? “Sultana’s Dream” does not make Sultana the sovereign of Ladyland! You see my point!
Amit Ranjan: It is framed, of course, like I said, and frame tales are very interesting, why they are framed. Framing makes it something very different. If you remove the frame and it is just a story set in the future, then it has a different dimension altogether. So by framing it, it is contained. That this is a dream for the future, or this is a dream of women, and that is also acknowledging that women’s situation is not exactly as Sultana would have liked it to be, but this is a dream.
Arup K. Chatterjee: So I, Amit, suppose our trading of barbed interests regarding London and New South Wales are not going to end anytime soon, because I will keep on finding connections with London and you will keep on with London via New South Wales.
Amit Ranjan: This is a very fruitful exercise because it informs us of all the myriad influences that were there at that time, which we take for granted and look at in a very simplistic manner. But at the grassroots, the situation seems to be much more interesting and complicated than mainstream history sees colonialism as. There is a lot of back and forth.
Arup K. Chatterjee: A lot of exchanges, indeed. In fact, you mentioned phrenology, and I am going to teach The Hound of the Baskervilles next, and it is a novel that begins with references to phrenology. Forensic science was actually created in colonial Bengal. We do not talk about it. We do not give any credit to colonial Bengal for Sherlock Holmes. Nobody in India wants to claim Sherlock Holmes. Whereas I have shown time after time after time how there is so much evidence, how the cases in London were actually founded on cases from Bengal. And you are perhaps one of the only persons I know in Indian academia with whom I have been able to talk about phrenology. I think we started a long time ago, if you remember. Because phrenology also gets connected to eugenics very easily. That connection is made. It is a very slippery connection.
Amit Ranjan: Yes, simultaneously, Darwin, phrenology, eugenics, all these ideas are from the late nineteenth century, the second half of the nineteenth century!
Arup K. Chatterjee: Exactly. So colonialism is far, far more diverse. Of course, it is not something we are celebrating. We are not in any way guilty of complicity with the colonial regime. But it is far more diverse, and “Sultana’s Dream” is an example of that diversity. Amit, let us rejoin soon and discuss more of your interests in the nineteenth century, and perhaps we will get to hear about Dara Shikoh as well in our next conversation.
Amit Ranjan: Sure. It was lovely having this conversation, and I hope readers will enjoy “Sultana’s Dream” with all this background as well. It is a text that everybody must read. Thank you so much, Amit. Always wonderful to speak to you, and thank you for giving your very precious time. Looking forward to join you soon, and thank you dear audience for tuning in.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Until next time!
Amit Ranjan: Thanks a lot. Bye.
Arup K. Chatterjee 