Sultan's Dream is a 1905 Bengali feminist utopian story in English written by Begum Rokeya also known as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain a Muslim feminist writer and social reformer from Bengal . It was published in the same year in Madras based English periodical . The Indian ladies magazine.
Sultan's Dream
According to Hossain she wrote Sultan's Dream as a way to pass the time while her husband Khan Bahadur Syed Sakhawat Hossain a deputy magistrate was away on a tour . Her husband was an appreciative audiance and encouraged Hossain to read and write in English .Thus writing Sultan's Dream in English was a way of demonstrating her proficiency in the language to her husband sakhawat was very impressed by the story and encouraged Hossain to submit the piece to the Indian ladies magazine which published the story for the first time in 1905 The story was later published in book form in 1908 . Hossain was born into a rich family who owned land. Though she knew how to read and write in Urdu . She was prevented from learning Bangla and English . In those days English was seen as a language that would expose girls to new ideas which society thought unsuitable . Rokeya learned to read and write English and Bangla with the help of her elder sister and elder brother. She wrote Sultan's Dream when she was merely 25 years old . In 1910 she started a school for girls in Kolkata and to this days the school is in operation.
Sultan's Reality
Sultan's Reality is an interactive multimedia story that explores the relationship between women and the colonial education movment in India using archival imagery women's writing and history .
If it's said that well behaved women seldom make history why it is that out history textbook rarely have women behaving badly ? Are the reader forgetting certain kinds of books or are the writers forgetting certain kinds of stories?
Drawing it's title from Sultan's Dream the 1905 science fiction short story of feminist utopian by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain Sultan's Reality explores the inner lives of the first generation of women to be be education in pre-independence India . The story is told through animated video graphics gifts comics collages and other digital art forms made by collating remixing re-interpreting and re- imagination of the female form . It tries to explore the multiplicity of women's history and also image making the ways in which it is told and remembered Sultan's Reality is perhaps an exercise in questioning history not the history of the image but a history that is constructed with the image.
