Reclaiming The Zenana: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Life-Writings as Feminist Autoethnography

Book: Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women's Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India by CSMFL Publications

Divya D.
Assistant Professor, Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India.

10.46679/9789349926509ch02
This chapter is a part of: Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women’s Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India
ISBN (Ebook): 978-93-49926-50-9
ISBN (Hardcover Print): 978-93-49926-84-4
ISBN (Softcover Print): 978-93-49926-34-9

© CSMFL Publications & its authors.
Published: April 15, 2026

D., D. (2026). Reclaiming The Zenana: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Life-Writings as Feminist Autoethnography. In N. Safrine, Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Muslim Women’s Life-Writings: An Autoethnographical Approach from India (pp 15-29). CSMFL Publications. https://dx.doi.org/10.46679/9789349926509ch02

Abstract

This chapter explores the writings of Hossain’s as profound and political acts of feminist protest. Constructed in the familiar elements of Indian Muslim women under colonial rule, Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag challenge both patriarchal diagnosis of religion and the colonial smothering of native female voices. Her works carry the roar of her personal history and experience of purdah, pain, and courage, and hence her attempts to envision Muslim womanhood not as compliance but as subversion. In Sultana’s Dream, the dream space becomes a canvas of inversion—men relegated to seclusion while women walk free, govern, and innovate. But it is Padmarag that reveals Hossain’s deeper, more grounded voice. The women in Tarini Bhavan reflect fragments of herself: educators, caretakers, and survivors building a world within a world. Their acts of everyday resistance—opening schools, offering shelter, reading letters in secret—become a powerful archive of Muslim women. In contemporary times, the zenana persists in new forms—whether in digital silencing, domestic expectations, or cultural gatekeeping—making Hossain’s reclamation of that space ever more relevant as women continue to carve out rooms of their own within and beyond inherited boundaries. Through her texts, Hossain blurred the line between fiction and lived truth. Her work speaks not from the margins, but from the heart of struggle—where faith becomes ethical, solidarity becomes sacred, and writing becomes survival. In reading her, we meet a woman who dreamed, fought, and mothered a movement—not only through activism but through storytelling. This chapter offers her voice the space it always deserved: not as exception, but as example.

Keywords: Hossain, Feminism, Purdah, Zenana, Resistance

References

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