Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Educating Women, (Not) Serving the Nation: The Interface of Feminism and Nationalism in the Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Get PDFRokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) wrote at a transitional time in the history of India. It was a time when Indian society was fast changing under the leadership of a new patriarchy, formed by the English-educated middle class. The emerging middle  class also led the anti-colonial nationalist movement. It is, therefore, important to read  Rokeya not only in terms of how she approached patriarchy but also in terms of its then newer manifestation in the form of nationalism. In her early works, Rokeya  appears to merge the national and woman question, regarding the liberation of the Indian women as part and parcel of the larger venture of national emancipation. The feminist agenda is actually conceptualised within a wider framework of nationalism. But midway in her writing and activist career, a shift seems to have taken place in relation to her engagement with the feminist agenda she has long been fighting to implement. For reasons elaborated in the main body of the present essay, she now came to consider the interests of Indian women as meriting independent treatment, initiating in the process a delinking of the two projects: feminist and nationalist. The separation of the two programmes finally enables her, I argue, to critique Indian nationalism in her later works. Â
A Not So Banal Evil: Rokeya in Confrontation with Patriarchy
Get PDFThis essay addresses Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s evaluation of the causes of women’s misfortunes in early twentieth century India even as it underscores her invaluable contributions to the improvement of women’s predicament in the public sphere. It shows how unnecessary vilification of activist women, in order to situate them within the limits of a prescriptive patriarchal vision, intensifies the difficulty of their work. Rokeya’s interrogation of such limits remains exemplary in a historical context in which gendered, binary ways of thinking were the norm. The essay also focuses on Rokeya’s strategy of combined exposure of patriarchal ills – both through direct address in her non-fiction and through deployment of artistic tropes in her fiction. In this regard, it locates and analyses a “trope of excess†in her work, a trope that often operates together with more specific themes of illness, entombment and homelessness
The Synonymy of the Story and the Message in Abdullah Hussain’s Novel Masuk ke dalam Cahaya
Get PDFWhen Abdullah Hussain’s novel Masuk ke dalam Cahaya, which won a consolation prize in an Islamic novel-writing competition in 1983, first met its reading public in the same year, there was no home-grown analytical framework, one dedicated to the Islamic worldview, to evaluate its literary merit and worthiness as an Islamic novel. But now there is the recently and locally-produced Persuratan Baru which, in consonant with Islamic precepts, prioritises true knowledge, and distinguishes between discourse and story, the former to articulate knowledge and the latter to develop and disseminate the knowledge so articulated. It also introduces, in ascending order of literary worthiness, the three categories of persuratan, sastera and picisan with persuratan and picisan occupying the highest and lowest strata respectively. With Persuratan Baru as its critical tool, the article examines the novel’s objective, and the extent to and manner in which the objective realised has been put to the service of disseminating true knowledge. The article argues that Masuk ke dalam Cahaya dismisses discourse as irrelevant, and presents the story and the message or knowledge as synonymous entities. In so doing, the novel prevails as a work of sastera for which story-making and the story serve as its main literary preoccupation
