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Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932): Author Profile

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This Author profile was written by Sana Asifriyaz, July 2026.

Biography

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), also known as Begum Rokeya, was a Bengali feminist writer and activist. Hossain was born in British India to an aristocratic Persian and Bengali Muslim family. At sixteen years of age, she married Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hossain, a 38-year-old deputy magistrate. He held progressive ideals as he encouraged Hossain to pursue her literary and linguistic education. 

Hossain was a staunch advocate for women and girls’ education and was particularly invested in supporting Muslim women’s advancement. In 1911, she founded a school in Kolkata for Muslim girls, Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ High School. In 1916, Hossain established the Muslim Women’s Association, which championed not only women’s education but also their professional development through conferences, debates, and social reform organizations.

Publications

Hossain penned various forms of texts, ranging from satirical essays to novels and short stories. She was published in several renowned journals and newspapers, including Saogat, The Mussalman, and Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika. Hossain is well-known for her satirical feminist utopian short story “Sultana’s Dream” (1908) in which gender roles are reversed: women enjoy the status of being more privileged than men and roam the public sphere freely, whereas men are cloistered in “mardanas,” a play on “zenanas” (secluded spaces for women). “Sultana’s Dream” also imagines innovative scientific technologies, such as balloon-held pipes that control precipitation and solar energy used for cooking. Hossain’s Delicia Hatya (1922) is a Bengali translation and retelling of Marie Corelli's English-language novel The Murder of Delicia (1896).

Ben Baer translates some of Hossain’s Bengali texts and, with Smaran Dayal, edits and introduces them in the collection Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2024). In Trans-imperial Feminism in England and India: Catherine Dickens, Marie Corelli, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2024), Kellie Holzer writes extensively about how Hossain’s work contributes to the form of the emerging Bengali novel by centering the Indian New Woman in her feminist writing.

Contents 

Padmarag (1924)
“Sultana’s Dream” (1908)
Abarodhbasini ("The Secluded Women") (1931)
Matichur 1st Vol. (Essays) (1904)
Matichur 2nd Vol. (Essays) (1922)
Delicia Hatya (1922)