Begum Rokeya: Pioneer of Women's Education in Bengal

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain — the writer, teacher and organiser Bangladesh remembers as Begum Rokeya — was born into a household where her brothers were sent to college and she was not allowed to learn her own mother tongue. She responded by teaching herself in secret, marrying a man who treated her mind as an asset rather than a threat, and then, widowed at twenty-eight, spending the rest of her life on a single proposition: that Muslim women would remain powerless until they were educated. She wrote the argument in essays and in one of the earliest feminist utopias in any language, and she built it in brick and timetable as a school for girls in Calcutta that still exists today. Few reformers of colonial Bengal left behind both a literature and an institution. She left both, and a date — 9 December, her birth and death day — that Bangladesh still keeps in her name.

A Childhood Behind the Purdah

Rokeya Khatun was born on 9 December 1880 (the date is the traditional one; births in such households went unrecorded) in Pairaband, a village in the Rangpur district of northern Bengal, into a prosperous zamindar family. Her father, Zahiruddin Abu Ali Haider Saber, was by the standards of his time an educated man — a scholar at home in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Hindi and English. None of that learning was meant for his daughters. Like most respectable Muslim families of the period, the Sabers kept their women in strict purdah, and from early childhood Rokeya and her elder sister Karimunnessa lived behind the curtain, seeing almost no one outside the family.

The division inside the house was stark. Her elder brothers were sent to St Xavier's College in Calcutta. The girls were taught at home, and taught very little: enough Arabic to read the Quran and enough Urdu to read the didactic manuals that instructed women in obedience and domestic duty. Bengali — the language Rokeya actually spoke — was considered unsuitable for girls of her class, a rough vernacular beneath them.

Her escape was her eldest brother. Ibrahim Saber, himself being educated in the world outside, secretly taught his sister Bengali and English at home, in defiance of their father's rules — by most accounts at night, when the lessons would not be discovered. Her sister and brothers encouraged her reading as well. It was an absurd way to acquire an education: the heir of a learned family, fluent in the language of its faith and its respectability, stealing literacy in her own tongue after dark. But it worked. The girl who was not supposed to read became, in time, the most consequential Bengali Muslim woman writer of her generation — and she never forgot that her schooling had depended on one person's willingness to break the rules.

Marriage and an Unlikely Ally

In 1896, at about sixteen (a few sources give 1898), Rokeya was married to Syed Sakhawat Hossain, an Urdu-speaking widower in his late thirties from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, who served as a deputy magistrate and held the title Khan Bahadur. Arranged marriages of that era usually ended a girl's education for good. Hers did the opposite.

Sakhawat Hossain was a liberal in a deeply conservative world. Instead of locking his young wife into the zenana, he encouraged her to study Bengali and English properly, to read widely in Bengali and foreign literature, and, in due course, to write. The couple settled in Bhagalpur. Their private happiness was real but shadowed: both of their daughters died in infancy. What endured was the partnership of minds. Sakhawat Hossain believed, and said, that the education of women was the cure for the ills of their society — and he put money behind the belief, setting aside ten thousand rupees for his wife to found a school for Muslim girls when the time came.

The time came abruptly. Sakhawat Hossain died on 3 May 1909, leaving Rokeya a widow of twenty-eight with no surviving children and a bequest earmarked for a school. In the society she lived in, a widow's expected script was retirement into pious obscurity. She chose instead to treat the bequest as a commission. Within five months she had opened her school — but her literary life, the thing that would make her famous, had already begun years earlier, at her husband's side.

Sultana's Dream and the Writer's Voice

Rokeya began publishing in the first years of the century — an early piece, "Pipasha", is dated to 1902, and from about 1903 she wrote for the journal Nabanoor under the byline "Mrs R. S. Hossain". Her essays, collected in the two volumes of Motichur (1904 and 1922), set out her argument with unusual directness: women had not been made inferior by nature; they had been made ignorant by design, kept uneducated and therefore economically helpless, and then mocked for the helplessness that had been imposed on them. Education, she insisted, was not an ornament for women but the precondition of their freedom — and economic independence its necessary companion.

Then, in 1905, writing in the English she had once had to learn in secret, she published something stranger and more durable. Sultana's Dream appeared in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in Madras (it came out as a book in 1908) and imagined Ladyland, a country ruled by women, where a wise queen presides over a peaceful, crime-free state powered by solar energy and run with scientific ingenuity — while the men, whose wars and carelessness made the old world ungovernable, are kept in seclusion in the mardana, the mirror image of the zenana. The joke was the argument: seclusion cripples whoever it is imposed on.

The novella is now recognised as a pioneering work of feminist science fiction, written years before comparable Western texts, and it has never been out of circulation since its modern reissues. But Rokeya's writing was never only visionary. She wrote essays, stories, poems and satire for dozens of journals, in Bengali and English, always returning to the same ledger of grievances: girls barred from school, women denied work, purdah enforced to the point of cruelty, and a male establishment that cited religion and custom in its own defence. Her pen made the case. Her school would test whether the case could be turned into fact.

The Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School

On 1 October 1909, five months after her husband's death, Rokeya opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School in Bhagalpur, named for the man whose money and encouragement had made it possible. It began with five students. It also began, almost immediately, to run into the forces it existed to fight. A dispute over family property with her stepdaughter's husband turned hostile, and in 1910 she was forced to close the school, abandon her home in Bhagalpur and start again in Calcutta.

On 16 March 1911 she reopened the school in a rented house at 13 Waliullah Lane, Calcutta, with eight students. This time it held. Enrolment climbed to eighty-four by 1915. The school was raised to a Middle English school in 1917 and to a High English school in 1931 — and it is often described as the first school in Calcutta founded specifically for Muslim girls, and certainly the most enduring of the early attempts. It survives to this day, now run by the state as the Sakhawat Memorial Government Girls' High School in Kolkata.

The early years were an education in her public. Bengali Muslim families, the people she most wanted to reach, were at first the least willing to send their daughters; her first pupils were mostly non-Bengali. So she went from house to house in person, persuading parents one courtyard at a time. She met purdah halfway in order to defeat it in the long run: girls would be kept in purdah within the school, and they travelled to and from it in covered horse-carriages she arranged. What happened inside the carriages' destination was quietly radical — a curriculum of Bengali, English, Urdu and Persian alongside home nursing, first aid, cooking, sewing, physical exercise and music. In an era when the Bengali language itself carried a contested status for Muslim families — a struggle over language and identity that Bangladesh would later seal with the sacrifices marked on International Mother Language Day — she put Bengali at the centre of her Muslim girls' schooling without apology.

There were not enough trained women teachers in Calcutta, so she trained her own, and she badgered the government until, in 1919, it opened a Muslim Women's Training School in the city. She ran her school through chronic shortages of money and space — it moved premises repeatedly as it grew — and through the "hostile criticism and various social obstacles" that Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, still records. She ran it, in fact, for the rest of her life: more than two decades of persuading, teaching and fundraising, executed by a woman who had herself been forbidden to attend school.

Anjuman-e-Khawatin: Organising Bengal's Muslim Women

A school proved the point for a few hundred girls. Rokeya wanted a mechanism that could reach women who would never sit in her classrooms. In 1916 she founded the Anjuman-e-Khawatin-e-Islam — the Muslim Women's Association — in Calcutta, among the first organisations of Muslim women in Bengal, created to make women conscious of their own rights.

The Anjuman fought on practical fronts. It campaigned for women's education, employment and legal and political rights. It paid the school expenses of large numbers of poor girls, found shelter for orphans and the destitute, gave financial help to widows, arranged marriages for girls whose families could not afford them, and set up small businesses so that women could earn money of their own. It was, in effect, the institutional twin of her essays: where the writing attacked the ideas that confined women, the association attacked the material conditions — poverty, dependence, illiteracy — that kept the confinement in place. Her public standing grew with the work; in 1926 she presided over the Bengal Women's Education Conference in Calcutta, a widow from Rangpur chairing the educational establishment of the province that had once denied her a classroom.

Later Writings and Final Years

The writing never stopped, and it grew bolder. Her novel Padmarag appeared in 1924, published with a dedication to the brother who had taught her to read. It portrays the struggles of Bengali wives — women discarded, widowed or trapped — and imagines its answer in Tarini Bhavan, a home and school for women in distress that is run, financed and staffed by women themselves: the Anjuman and the school transposed into fiction.

Her last book, Abarodhbasini (The Secluded Ones), published in 1931, is her most unsparing. It assembles short, factual, frequently sardonic reports of purdah as actually practised — women carried in closed boxes, women unable to summon help in emergencies, seclusion enforced among Hindu as well as Muslim families — and lets the accumulated absurdity and danger make the argument. It is reportage as polemic, and it remains uncomfortable reading.

She died as she had lived since 1909: at work. On 9 December 1932, in Calcutta, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain died of heart failure, aged fifty-two — on the very date kept as her birthday. She left no children and no fortune. She left a school mid-term, an association mid-campaign, and a shelf of books mid-argument.

Legacy

Bangladesh has kept her date. Every 9 December the country observes Rokeya Day, marking her birth and death together, and the government confers the Begum Rokeya Padak on women who have distinguished themselves in the struggle she began. In 1964 the University of Dhaka renamed its oldest women's residence — founded in 1938 — Rokeya Hall in her honour, and her statue stands there among the students; a women's hall at Jahangirnagar University bears her name as well. In her home district, the public university founded at Rangpur in 2008 was renamed Begum Rokeya University in 2009. And in a 2004 BBC Bangla poll of the greatest Bengalis of all time, listeners placed her sixth — the only woman in the top twenty.

The institutions named after her measure her fame; her own institution measures her method. The Sakhawat Memorial school still teaches girls in Kolkata, more than a century after a widow with eight pupils rented rooms for it in Waliullah Lane. In Bangladesh, the proposition she spent her life on — that a girl's schooling is not a favour but a right, and that education must reach women wherever they are — now runs through everything from state policy to the phone screens where platforms such as 10 Minute School carry lessons to students in every district. The journey from eight girls in a rented house to a nation that treats her birthday as a public observance is the distance her work travelled.

Conclusion

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's life is usually told as an inspiration, but it is better understood as a demonstration. Denied education, she acquired it anyway; denied a public role, she built public institutions; told that seclusion was women's nature, she wrote a world in which it was men's. She did not wait for Bengal to be ready for educated women. She opened a school with five pupils, and then with eight, and let readiness follow. That is why, nearly a century after her death, she is not merely commemorated in Bangladesh but cited — by teachers, organisers and schoolgirls — as the pioneer of Muslim women's education in Bengal, and as proof that the argument, patiently built and stubbornly maintained, can win.