Abstract:

Humanity has long dreamed about a better future and an imagined better world. Utopias, "the good place, which is no place", are one of the most influential ways of creating an ideal world and also serve as a crucial tool for expressing feminist ideology. Feminist utopias, for about ages, reflect the hopes, fears and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. By contrasting the present world with an idealized society, feminist utopias criticize the contemporary values and conditions and see masculine systems as the major cause of social and political problems. R.S. Hossain, a pioneering Bengali Muslim feminist and educationist, with her imaginative and ambitious narrative: Sultana's Dream (1905) provides a definite vision of what society could become if women were allowed to fully participate as citizens. The work projects the desire for a peaceful, efficient and egalitarian society, and predicts the possibility of obtaining that desire through greater freedom for women. As a consequence, the present paper will focus on a women on the edge of time, Begüm Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, her short work, Sultana's Dream, originally written in English. This study will highlight how she tries to create an ideal world, believing in the importance of education as holding the key to women's empowerment and progress. This paper will also concern itself with her personal journey on the road not taken before, the awakening of the Muslim women‘s self respect through self-reliance, and the universalist concept of shared humanity that admits no discrimination of caste, creed, race or gender.

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