Sultana's Dream

Katherine Mayo had an overriding political purpose: to ridicule Indian aspirations for national independence by writing a sensational account purportedly “exposing” issues relating to women, family life, sexuality, and seclusion. Her highly moralistic account focuses on purdah—which she calls “life imprisonment within the four walls of the home”—and early marriage. In a typical passage, she writes that Indians suffered from “undeniable race deterioration” brought on by “sexual indulgence,” which made “their hands … too weak, too fluttering to seize or hold the reins of Government” at the age when “the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood.”16 Although Mayo’s account has been praised by modern feminist writers,17 her obvious political purposes and her racism make her a very unreliable witness.

Seen from this perspective, the issue of honor provides men with extraordinary power to control female behavior, precisely because men are passionately concerned with safeguarding their “derivative” honor

Rokeya wrote as a Muslim about purdah among Muslims in Bengal (present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal), but it is hard to reconstruct life in purdah only from her utopian mirror images.