Today’s warnings: Gender essentialism, and for once that’s it! I should have found a way out of the whiteness of this series much earlier for a lot of good reasons, but not having to warn for every prejudice an upper middle class white lady from the first half of the 20th century might have is a pleasant change.
Hat tip to Gautam Bhatia’s interview of Dip Ghosh in Strange Horizons for putting me onto this story. I’ve been relying overmuch on books like Sisters of Tomorrow (referenced in multiple earlier entries) and internet lists about early women in SF, and stuff like that skews, well, to upper middle class white ladies. I should not be on the fifth entry in this series and my first author of color.
“Sultana’s Dream” is cheerfully didactic. There’s no speedbump like finding a story has wrapped itself in a thin layer of plot only to throw the robe open and flash you with OPINIONS, but I can respect a story that’s just embracing itself as a multi-layered fable. It’s why The Future of Another Timeline is good, clean fun and The Sword of Truth is for squirrels to nest in. (You know what? No link for SoT. Terry Goodkind gets no visibility from me. Go ask the ghost of Ayn Rand. She’s probably still haunting all those social security checks she accepted.) This is a simple feminist utopia on the surface with a lot roiling beneath, and science fiction doesn’t spend enough time enjoying those roots. Just ask Margaret Cavendish.
This is Begum Rokeya’s (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s) only story in English. She devoted her pen and her life to feminist activism, with most of her writing falling outside the spec-fic umbrella. Though born to a fairly traditional family who didn’t want her studying anything that might give her ideas or damage her standing, she married (albeit very young) a man who supported her writing and ideas. She wrote “Sultana’s Dream” early in her public career, publishing in The Indian Ladies Magazine. She went on to run a girl’s school for more than twenty years, found the Islamic Women’s Association, and have statues built of her, among the many highlights of her incredible career, though she died tragically young at only fifty-two.
What happens in “Sultana’s Dream”? Exposition. Some walking. It’s not really a story about that story. It’s quite short and perfectly self contained, the dream promised in the title perfectly framing its protagonist’s adventure into another, better world and returning her to this one, still in need of mending. (The story is captured in a fantastic art exhibit by Chitra Ganesh, showcasing the staying power of this story as well as the power of work that lives on through new art.)
“One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood.” It’s a hell of an opener. Met in her room by a woman she thinks is her friend Sara, our protagonist immediately agrees to a midnight garden walk with someone who apparently has no compunctions about doors. This seems fair, honestly. (Somewhat confusingly, this woman is not, in fact, her friend Sara, but is still referred to as such for the rest of the story. I like to imagine there’s a sort of parallel dimension to it all, and this is the Sara of the simplistic feminist Utopia, come to enlighten a friend. But I’m probably reading into it.) The rest of the story is a walking tour of Ladyland, which sounds like a lesbian bar that’s been closed for decades but is still legendary, but here is a country where men are consigned to seclusion from the world and women run everything.
Why? Science. There’s a convoluted origin story involving a war and a pair of dueling women’s universities and an enlightened queen, all of which is super cool if a bit bonkers, but the takeaway is science. Superior thinking and the technology generated thereof is what made Ladyland and preserves it in perfection. It’s very solarpunk. The principle wonders to point and gawk at (this is very early SF, after all, and that’s what you do) are solar power and clean water extraction that allows for climate control. Weapons of war are explicitly rejected as the road to technological superiority (though not through pacifism, because turns out you can repurpose solar powered wonders to also melt enemy guns). There’s a lot of stuff about how women don’t require a legal system and religion is now just Truth and Love? Those bits feel a bit weird, living more than a century later and having seen all the ways that sort of women are good and pure and smart and men are dirt impulse can go. Nowhere good. But written in its own time and place, and as a thought experiment? I’m inclined to forgive. Especially as a deeper reading suggests that Sister Sara and Sultana aren’t exactly in the right. Begum Rokeya’s advocacy was for equal treatment of men and women, she not being a weird straw feminist created by an actuary named Dennis who harasses women on twitter for a hobby. The story hinges on serving back isolation from the world and restrictions on freedom all the way down to leaving the house, a turnabout for turnabout’s sake, not a solution.
Did the author really believe Ladyland wouldn’t need a legal system? Eh. Probably not. That’s a bit silly. Did she have a lot to say about secluding women from any kind of public life? Oh. Very yes. There’s a very interesting tidbit about redefining family to give a bit more freedom to interactions with male relatives, for example, that reminds the reader to resist any attempt at universalizing the moral. There are timeless aspects to the simple story, but “Sultana’s Dream” is born in its own moment, on the crest of Begum Rokeya’s wave. The story is not kind to those who simply accept their fate, the men of Ladyland or the women beyond. The time will come when you fall out of your flying car and the fall startles you out of your dream. What then?
Oh yeah, they had flying cars. Neat.
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