“Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?”
“Because it cannot be helped, as they are stronger than women.”
“A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.”—Sultana’s Dream, 1905
In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote Sultana’s Dream, a short story that imagines Ladyland. In this solar-powered, woman-led society, justice is reasoned, not ruled. Hossain wrote it in English while living behind purdah in colonial Bengal. More than a hundred years later, as Muslim women in India face shrinking access to education, hijab bans in schools—which are more about denying them choice than granting them freedom—and rising hostility, Sultana’s Dream reads less like fantasy and more like a warning. Silence, unless resisted, becomes inheritance.
Hossain was born in 1880 in the village of Pairabondh near Rangpur, in what is now Bangladesh. Her family were landed aristocrats with Persian ancestry—proud, conservative, and steeped in a cultural order where Persian and Arabic were valued, but Bengali was considered inappropriate for elite Muslim women. It was the language of the peasants. Girls like Hossain were not permitted to read it. She learned it anyway. Nor was she allowed to read or write in English, but she did so anyway. Her brothers taught her in secret. Hossain would later use that forbidden English to publish one of the earliest works of feminist science fiction and to argue that the veil should never be used to veil injustice.
In 1911, Hossain opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in Calcutta with just five students, armed with nothing but her late husband’s encouragement and her own inherited jewellery. Clerics denounced her. Bricks were thrown. However, the school survived, and it continues to operate today.
Her literary work was equally forceful. In Sultana’s Dream, men are confined for their own safety while women rule through reason and science. The women grow vegetables in rooftop gardens, generate power from the sun, and walk freely through clean streets.
“We shut our men indoors,” says Sultana’s guide, “just as they used to keep us in the zenana. But we do not merely keep them confined; we secure their good conduct as well. They do not go about robbing and killing... nor are they allowed to idle away their time in the streets.”— Sultana’s Dream, 1905
In Abarodhbasini, Hossain compiled accurate accounts of purdah-enforced suffering: women dying in childbirth because no male doctor could treat them, girls who never saw daylight. She didn’t decorate these stories. She recorded them.
Hossain’s insistence on literacy and visibility came at a time when Muslim women were largely excluded from the subcontinent’s reform movements. Hindu reformers in the Brahmo and Arya Samaj were pushing for education and widow remarriage. Muslim women remained sequestered—cut off not just from public life, but from their own written histories.
The rare exception—like Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum of Bhopal, my maternal ancestor—was exceptional precisely because she ruled. As the last Begum of Bhopal, Sultan Jahan reformed women’s health and education, passed sanitation laws, and became the first female Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. Hossain, by contrast, came from the cloistered quarters of a feudal household and spoke for women who had no platform at all.
After Independence, Muslim personal law was kept outside India’s civil code. The result was paradoxical: cultural identity was preserved, but legal reform—especially around divorce, inheritance, and polygamy—lagged behind. From that gap emerged women who carried Hossain’s work forward: Ismat Chughtai, who stood trial for obscenity in 1942 for Lihaaf; and Anis Kidwai, who chronicled the ravages of Partition in In Freedom’s Shade.
Today, Muslim women in India continue to walk the line between hypervisibility and exclusion. In Karnataka in 2022, schoolgirls were barred from their classrooms for wearing the hijab. The courts upheld the ban. Triple Talaq was criminalised in 2019—seen by some as a necessary reform, by others as a top-down intervention enacted without consultation. According to the ASER Report, Muslim girls remain among the least likely in India to complete secondary school. Laws like the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens have created deep insecurity, especially among undocumented women without birth or marriage certificates.
Yet despite all of this, Hossain’s legacy is unbroken. When she wrote, “The era is over when men would trample on us and still have us licking their boots,” she made clear that she would not buckle under patriarchy. That same refusal runs through the poetry of Fehmida Riaz, as seen in Rana Ayyub’s Gujarat Files, which laid bare the complicity of state officials during the 2002 pogrom when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat. It is loud in Meena Kandasamy’s jagged, necessary prose, and in Saba Dewan’s work, which reclaim the lives of courtesans, sex workers, and other women written out of history.
Education remains the revolution. The Shaheen Group in Karnataka runs hostels and schools for Muslim girls, many from under-resourced backgrounds. Enrolment at universities like Aligarh Muslim University and Tata Institute of Social Sciences is rising, even as Islamophobia deepens and public funding tightens.
And then there is the diaspora. In July 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—a leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and a central figure in India’s rightward political shift—visited Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, part of a regional tour celebrating Indian diaspora ties. He was welcomed formally in both nations, but the symbolism was clearest in Guyana, where he had received the Order of Excellence from President Irfaan Ali, a practising Muslim, months earlier, in November 2024.
The gesture signalled a shift—however careful—towards inclusion. Whether it was diplomatic balance or sincere recognition, it marked a moment.
Trinidad’s Muslim women have lived through a different kind of invisibility. Many are the descendants of indentured labourers who arrived between 1845 and 1917, speaking Urdu and Bhojpuri, carrying prayer books, spices, and the memory of a homeland that had already begun to forget them.
They built mosques from scratch, taught their children to recite the Qur’an at dawn before heading off to colonial schools, ran market stalls and sewing services. Their work was local, unrecorded, and often unacknowledged. But they raised daughters who became doctors, lawyers, judges, university lecturers, diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, novelists, and public figures—Muslim women excelling in every field, grounded in both faith and modernity.
Like Hossain, they translated their faith and culture into action, in education, trade, and community life.
Even the ardent champions of a saffron India must recognise that Modi’s reception in Guyana—where he received the country’s highest honour from a Muslim president—signals something more profound. India cannot afford to sideline Muslim women, who are part of a global community of nearly two billion. Their voices are rising—crossing borders, genres, and generations—defying stereotypes. Even under immense pressure, they are stepping forward, speaking out, and claiming space both within and beyond their communities. In doing so, they are challenging erasure and contempt, and offering the world a fuller, more inclusive vision of progress.
A century after Hossain imagined a world governed by reason and justice–the question of the women who are seen, heard, protected, have equal access to all it takes to live a free, just and full life-across borders and beliefs—remains urgent and political.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. Visit www.irasroom.org | Email: irasroom@gmail.com
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