In Sultana’s Dream, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopia is not a simple utopia: it is a parody of one, and I will argue, an invitation to invent another. It does not imagine an ideal; it plays with the idea of one. As a result, it is playfully reproductive of masculine presents and futures: the society has purdah, but the men are the ones locked up; it is a techno-utopia. They have no need for fire or weaponry — they harness the power of the sun; they have an abundance of water which they harness from the atmosphere. They live in such abundance that they subsist mainly on fruits, which are grown in gardens in which “every creeper, every tomato plant was itself an ornament.” The natural world is rewired for human pleasure, functionally and aesthetically.
Begum Rokeya's parody of a utopia closely resembles non-satirical post-scarcity fantasies of her time and since. Whereas her reproduction of the present inverts it, her reproduction of imagined futures does not. By gender-bending present institutions of gendered subjugation, Begum Rokeya more than shows their absurdity. But by reproducing conventional utopian imaginaries, she demonstrates that they, too, are absurd. She demonstrates the gendered work that they do. A world in which men are locked in the zenanas and humans harness the power of nature to satisfy their every need is a world in which women live out the masculine dream of subjugating all else to their ends. They subjugate the opposite gender and the natural world. In rendering this world, Begum Rokeya shows how it is not only tradition that acts as an instrument of women’s subjugation. Imagined futures do, too. An imagined future can serve as a fictional end towards which a society can be organized. If that end is absolute extractive power over the natural world, Begum Rokeya points out, that is no utopia: half the population will still be locked up in the zenana. By gender-bending the post-scarcity utopia, Begum Rokeya confronts her readers with the question: who is post-scarcity for? By parodying (i.e. demonstrating) the patriarchy-enforcing work that existing utopian imaginaries do, she invites her readers to invent new and liberating utopian imaginaries.
Sultana’s Dream is not a utopia; it is a parody of a utopia that invites new utopias.