Rokeya Sakhawat
Hossain
By Dr Barnita
Bagchi
01 October, 2003
The
life and work of multifaceted South Asian Bengali feminist (writer,
novelist, essayist, polemicist, teacher, manager of a school, social
worker) Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) provides inspiration and
a rich source of insight to all those committed to furthering equity
in education, and to those who perceive that processes of development
in a patriarchal, multifaith society must be taken up and furthered
by activist women intellectuals who invest energy in furthering formal
education, particularly school education for girls.
Rokeya is a diamond in the history of women's emancipation in South
Asia: every little corner of her life and work yields beauty and splendour.
Bangladesh celebrates her by observing Rokaya Day on December 9 each
year, while India too boasts of many and growing numbers of admirers
and scholars. A recent book by the distinguished scholar Professor Bharati
Ray, Early Bengali Feminists, for example, analysed the richness of
Rokeya's work.
As a crusader for
girls' education, Rokaya saw the integral link between adult women's
life-long learning and growth, that is women's own self-development
and emancipation, and the education of millions of girls who even today
lack access or security in schooling, a problem which is particularly
acute in South Asia.
Rokeya set up a
school for girls in 1909 in Bhagalpur, Bihar with the material and intellectual
support of her husband. After being widowed, she came to Calcutta and
re-opened her school, called Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School, in 1911.
The school evolved into a full-fledged high school by the time of her
death. It was a pioneering institution for Muslim girls, and still flourishes
with government aid, a testament to the solidity of Rokeya's effort.
The same Rokeya all through her life wrote impassioned, highly intelligent
polemics about the oppression, discrimination, pain, and obstacles to
development faced by women, both within her own community, and by women
belonging to all communities. Published first as a series of columns
in 1928-30, her Abarodhbasini ('The Secluded Ones'), bold and unflinching
in its denunciation of the cruelty of the then-prevalent system of purdah,
took Bengal by storm, as did similar essays in Motichur (1903-04). Sultana's
Dream (1905), written in delightfully easy, humorous style, in English,
depicted a female utopia where the principal of the ladies' college
is largely instrumental in taking over the reins of government from
a militaristic, patriarchal regime.
It is Rokeya's much-neglected
novella Padmarag (1924) which shows her bringing together her espousal
of women's personal journeys of growth and emancipation and their working
to advance educational equity. This also shows her powerfully, explicitly,
and boldly expressing her belief in an unsectarian, universalist society
where women from all races, creeds, and colours, having suffered from
patriarchal oppression, determine to better their lot by concrete social
action and organising, and devote themselves to the often thankless
task of getting out of school girls into school.
In this work of
Rokeya's, a young widow, of Hindu origin, sets up a community which
will both give shelter and training to women who have faced patriarchal
and familial oppression, and which also runs a school, a vocational
training workshop, and a home for the sick and destitute. The women
who find refuge and run the community are Muslims, Brahmos, Christian,
and Hindu-as well as white and black. We find wonderfully realistic
details of pioneering working women typing, managing accounts, supervising
subordinates, teaching: in short, taking on the full gamut of activities
that competent women educators undertake.
Delving into the
richness of Rokeya's educational work and her fictional depiction of
it, I find as a feminist academic working in the field of gender, education,
and development that we have troves of learning to glean from her. Today,
the problem of girls' education in South Asia is urgently and worryingly
acute. As the Education For All UNESCO initiative noted in 2000, half
the girls in South Asia (as in sub-Saharan Africa) never attend school,
over half the female population above 15 is illiterate, and South Asia
has the highest gender gap in education of 29 points.
Meanwhile, international
education and development experts are increasingly advocating that to
progress in primary or basic education, one needs grassroots-based,
community-based educational movements that heavily involve adult women
from the community acting as motivators, participants, galvanizers,
and teachers. We need simultaneous emphasis on adult education and life-long
learning for women, with a recognition that women make exceptionally
successful educational mobilizers and teachers. Recent success stories
in school education, whether the schooling revolution involving hill
women in Himachal Pradesh, or the success of community-based, women
teacher-based civil society organization based movements such as BRAC
in Bangladesh or Pratham in India, demonstrate the effectiveness of
women taking charge of their own lives and entering teaching and community
mobilization, with a special sensitivity to girls.
This is the mighty
power and success unleashed when women, education, and social capital
work in synergy, and this Rokeya realised and attempted heroically to
achieve on micro-scale in the last century. The heritage of Rokeya's
multifaith, multicultural, gender-just vision needs to be retrieved
and learned from by those of us working in the field of development
who have a similar unsectarian, feminist ethos, and who want urgently
to bring millions of South Asian children and adults, particularly the
neglected girls and women, into the fold of education.
Barnita Bagchi
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research
General Vaidya Marg, Goregaon E
Mumbai 400065, India
[email protected], [email protected]