Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (9 December 1880 – 9 December 1932), commonly known as Begum Rokeya, was a Bengali feminist thinker, writer, educator and political activist from British India, widely regarded as a pioneer of feminism in Bangladesh and India. ¹ She advocated for men and women to be treated equally as rational beings, noted that the lack of education for women was responsible for their inferior economic position, and held education to be the central precondition of women's liberation. ^{1 2}

She was born Rokeya Khatun at Pairaband in Rangpur into a landed family: her father, Zahiruddin Muhammad Abu Ali Haidar Saber, was a zamindar and a multilingual intellectual versed in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Bangla, Hindi and English, and her mother was Rahatunnessa Chowdhury. ^{2 1} Her ancestors had served in the military and judiciary departments during the Mughal regime. ²

Her father, like the society around him, held that women should not receive education beyond the bounds of home: he sent her elder brothers to St Xavier's College, Calcutta, but Rokeya and her elder sister Karimunnesa were not sent to school, and she learnt Bengali and English at home with her brothers' help; her brothers and sister also inspired her writing. ^{2 1}

In 1898 she married Syed Sakhawat Hossain, an Urdu-speaking deputy magistrate from Bhagalpur in Bihar, who was liberal and progressive and encouraged his wife to study Bengali and English and to read literary works from home and abroad; she began writing at the same time. ^{2 1} Her husband died on 3 May 1909; her two daughters died in infancy. ²

She began writing in the Nabanoor from about 1903 under the name Mrs R S Hossain — some hold that her first published writing, Pipasa, appeared in the Nabaprabha in 1902 — and wrote regularly for the Saogat, Mohammadi, Nabaprabha, Mahila, Bharatmahila, Al-Islam, Nawroz, Mahe Nao, the Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika, The Mussalman, the Indian Ladies Magazine and others. ^{2 1}

Five months after her husband's death, on 1 October 1909, she started a school for Muslim girls at Bhagalpur with only five students, naming it after him the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School; domestic reasons forced her to move to Calcutta, where she set the school up at 13 Waliullah Lane on 16 March 1911 with eight students. ^{2 1} It was upgraded to a Middle English Girls' School in 1917 and to a High English Girls' School in 1931, moved from place to place as it grew — in 1931 at 13 European Asylum Lane and in 1932 at 162 Lower Circular Road — and through all difficulties she ran it for twenty-four years, facing hostile criticism and various social obstacles, and made it one of the best seats of learning available for Muslim girls. ²

The school taught Bangla, English, Urdu, Persian, home nursing, first aid, cooking, sewing, physical exercise and music; she trained the teachers herself, there being few competent women teachers in Calcutta, went from house to house persuading parents to send their girls, assured guardians that purdah would be maintained at the school, and arranged horse-carriages so that girls could travel to and from school in purdah; at her repeated urging the government set up the Muslim Women Training School in Calcutta in 1919. ²

In 1916 she founded the Anjuman-e-Khawateen-e-Islam, the Muslim Women's Association, to make women aware of their rights; it stood in the forefront of the fight for women's education, employment and legal and political rights, defrayed the cost of education for a large number of girls, arranged marriages for poor girls, sheltered orphans and the destitute, gave financial help to widows and established businesses for women's economic independence. ^{2 1} In 1926 she presided over the Bengal Women's Education Conference at Kolkata, the first significant attempt to bring women together in support of women's education rights, and she remained engaged in debates and conferences on the advancement of women until her death. ¹

She wrote in a number of genres — short stories, poems, essays, novels and satirical writings — in a distinctive style characterised by creativity, logic and a wry sense of humour, and her writings called upon women to protest against injustice and break the social barriers that discriminated against them. ^{2 1} Her major works include Matichur (A String of Sweet Pearls), two volumes of essays (1904 and 1922) articulating her feminist ideas; Sultana's Dream, the feminist satire set in Ladyland, a realm governed by women where the roles of the sexes are reversed — dated 1905 in the English article's lead and works list and 1908 in its marriage section and in Banglapedia, both dates being recorded here; Padmarag (Essence of the Lotus, 1924), a novel portraying the struggles of Bengali wives; and Abarodhbasini (The Secluded Women, 1931), a bold critique of the extreme forms of purdah that imperilled women's lives and self-worth. ^{1 2}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Rokeya held that social injustice and extreme forms of purdah kept Muslim women backward and helpless, that the attitude of male society to women's education had to change before women could be emancipated, and she used her pen against social prejudice, religious bigotry and ignorance. ² The English article records that her association organised events for social reforms based on what she held to be the original teachings of Islam, which she considered lost, and that she blamed parochialism and excessive conservatism for the relatively slow development of Muslims in British India. ¹ Neither source names a school for her, so the faith field in her data record remains unknown. ^{1 2}

She died of heart problems in Calcutta on 9 December 1932, on her fifty-second birthday, shortly after presiding over a session during the Indian Women's Conference. ^{1 2} Bangladesh observes Rokeya Day on 9 December each year, when the government confers the Begum Rokeya Padak on women for exceptional achievement; in 2004 she was ranked sixth in the BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time, and universities, public buildings and a national award bear her name. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.