Sultana's Dream

Katherine Mayo had an overriding political purpose: to ridicule Indian aspirations for national independence by writing a sensational account purportedly “exposing” issues relating to women, family life, sexuality, and seclusion. Her highly moralistic account focuses on purdah—which she calls “life imprisonment within the four walls of the home”—and early marriage. In a typical passage, she writes that Indians suffered from “undeniable race deterioration” brought on by “sexual indulgence,” which made “their hands … too weak, too fluttering to seize or hold the reins of Government” at the age when “the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood.”16 Although Mayo’s account has been praised by modern feminist writers,17 her obvious political purposes and her racism make her a very unreliable witness.

Seen from this perspective, the issue of honor provides men with extraordinary power to control female behavior, precisely because men are passionately concerned with safeguarding their “derivative” honor

Rokeya wrote as a Muslim about purdah among Muslims in Bengal (present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal), but it is hard to reconstruct life in purdah only from her utopian mirror images.

Purdah, for example, is by no means universal in Muslim populations, and, where it does exist, it varies widely in form and severity

The revival of veiling, therefore, is not an isolated phenomenon in a distant part of the world—it has its direct counterparts in countries where most people have never heard of purdah

Among Indian Muslims, for example, women’s participation in the nationalist movement, not only as followers but also as leaders, was paralleled by their gradual emergence from purdah. The modernized, educated elite in the former colonies, which included Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, were also interested in convincing rulers that they were ready to govern their own countries. Releasing women from seclusion, if that had been the practice, was part of the process of demonstrating their modernity and often reflected a desire to emulate the colonial rulers in order to become equally strong

In the first half of this century, the emancipation of women and the rejection of veiling were closely related to national movements for independence from colonial rule

Seen from a global and historical perspective, the rejection of purdah and its recent partial revival present a striking paradox. Both rejection and revival are founded on ideas of national identity and stress the central importance of women in the symbolism of nationhood

Veiling is being revived in a number of countries, and some women are carefully limiting their contacts with men

Rokeya’s specific concern was the practice of purdah among the Muslims of Bengal; in this essay, I take a somewhat broader view. It is not easy to define purdah; the word is a kind of shorthand for practices that might include, depending on choices made by families, veiling the face, wearing a concealing cloak, living in secluded quarters, and never meeting men outside the family