An Ecofeminist Criticism of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” - Hossain Al Mamun

As a utopia fiction, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (1980-1932) Sultana’s Dream narrates a fantasy of a young woman-Sultana, who visits a ‘Ladyland’ run solely by women where she encounters perfect order and harmony everywhere using natural resources applying technologies and following ‘love’ as their religion. The author invites women of colonial Indian Muslim society to have an illusory experience of freedom by criticizing the selfishness of patriarchy and the self-slavery of women in a similar way showing how only education can be the driving force of women's emancipation in the context of using natural details and recourses, as much as possible. In the story, a native guide for Sultana, Sister Sara introduces how they make nature yield as much as they can and they dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems that Nature has kept in store for them and how they enjoy their lives in the availability of electricity and aerial transport, clean streets and lush gardens; pleasurable labour and plenty of leisure in a ‘no crime and no disease’ Herland where women are out of zenana (seclusion in four walls) who are studying in universities and conducting marvellous researchers with the inventions of machines for reserving rainwater and the sun heat. Therefore, Rokeya’s story explores a techno-scientific utopianism within a broader Ecofeminist perspective. This paper examines how Ecofeminism relates women and nature with the tendency toward ‘domination of the environment as an extension of the logic of patriarchy’ to claim that the treatment of women and nature requires analysis which should not be male-biased.