Which of the following works was not contributed by the famous social reformer Begum Rokeya?

Correct — C, (c) Mother India. The ask is negative — the word not is printed in bold italic on the page — so the answer is the one title on the list that Begum Rokeya did not write, and that is Mother India. It is a book by Katherine Mayo, an American journalist, published in 1927. Mayo wrote it as an argument against Indian self-government, using the condition of Indian women, child marriage and untouchability as her evidence, and it caused an uproar in India; Gandhi’s review dismissed it as the report of a drain inspector sent to open and examine the drains of the country, and dozens of books and pamphlets were published in reply. Nothing about it belongs to Rokeya. The other three titles are hers. Ardhangi, meaning the female half, and Griha, meaning home, are among the essays she published in the first years of the century and collected in Motichur, in which she examines what confinement to the household does to women and argues that a woman who is called half of a man is in practice treated as very much less. Sultana’s Dream is her best-known work, an English feminist fable of a country called Ladyland where the seclusion is reversed, the men are kept indoors and the women run the state and its science. Rokeya was herself an institution builder as well as a writer: she opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in 1909 and founded a Muslim women’s association in 1916.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Ardhangi — Ardhangi is Begum Rokeya’s, so it cannot be the answer to a question asking which work is not hers. The word means the female half — the conventional compliment paid to a wife as half of her husband — and the essay turns that compliment over to ask what the half in question is actually permitted to do, learn or own. It belongs with the group of essays she published in the opening years of the twentieth century and gathered into the collection Motichur, and it is one of the pieces in which her argument about seclusion is made most directly.
• (b)Griha — Griha is also hers, and the title means home. Like Ardhangi it comes from the same set of early essays collected in Motichur, and it examines the household as the place where the restriction of women is organised and justified rather than as the refuge it was presented as being. A candidate who does not recognise the title may be tempted to choose it for that reason alone, which is the risk this option is designed to exploit; unfamiliarity with a title is not evidence about its author.
• (d)Sultana’s Dream — Sultana’s Dream is the work of Rokeya’s that is best known outside Bengali, and it is unmistakably hers. Written in English and published in 1905, it imagines Ladyland, a country in which the customary seclusion has been inverted: the men are shut up indoors, the women manage the government, and science — solar power, controlled rainfall, flying vehicles — has been turned to peaceful use. It is read now as one of the earliest feminist utopias written anywhere, and it is regularly set beside her essays as the imaginative counterpart to their argument.

Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, born in 1880 in Rangpur and dying in 1932, is the central figure of Muslim women’s education in Bengal, and her work has three parts that belong together. First the writing: the essays in Motichur, the fable Sultana’s Dream, the novel Padmarag, and Abarodhbasini, a collection of episodes about women in seclusion which is at once comic and appalling. Second the institutions: the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School, opened at Bhagalpur in 1909 with a handful of pupils and moved to Calcutta in 1911, which she ran for the rest of her life; and the women’s association she founded in 1916 to work on education and employment. Third the argument itself, which was that seclusion was not a religious requirement but a social convention, that it disabled women economically as much as socially, and that education was the only remedy that reached the root of it. Placing her against Pandita Ramabai and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, both of whom appear elsewhere in this paper, gives a picture of the women’s movement as a set of parallel regional efforts rather than a single campaign.

Key facts

• Mother India was written by Katherine Mayo, an American journalist, and published in 1927; it argued against Indian self-government using the condition of Indian women as evidence.
• Gandhi reviewed Mother India as the report of a drain inspector, and the book provoked a large number of published replies in India.
• Ardhangi, meaning the female half, and Griha, meaning home, are essays by Begum Rokeya, collected in Motichur.
• Sultana’s Dream, published in 1905, is Rokeya’s English feminist fable of Ladyland, where men live in seclusion and women govern.
• Rokeya opened the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School at Bhagalpur in 1909 and moved it to Calcutta in 1911.
• She founded a Muslim women’s association in 1916 to work for the education and employment of women.
• Her other books include Padmarag and Abarodhbasini, a collection of episodes about the working of purdah.

Common traps

• Missing the emphasised not and choosing the title that is most obviously the author’s.
• Eliminating a title because it is unfamiliar. Two of the three genuine works here are essays that a candidate is unlikely to have read.
• Assuming an English title cannot be an Indian author’s. Rokeya’s most famous work is in English.
• Forgetting that Mother India is itself an examinable book, with a known author, year and controversy.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Mother India, published in 1927 and answered by a wave of Indian pamphlets, was written by whom?

  • (a)Katherine Mayo
  • (b)Annie Besant
  • (c)Margaret Cousins
  • (d)Beatrice Webb

  Answer(a) Katherine Mayo

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Sultana’s Dream, a fable set in a country called Ladyland where men live in seclusion and women govern, was written by whom?

  • (a)Toru Dutt
  • (b)Sarojini Naidu
  • (c)Begum Rokeya
  • (d)Cornelia Sorabji

  Answer(c) Begum Rokeya