An Analytical Review of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Feminist Thought on Gender, Education, and Patriarchy

Abstract

This paper is an analytical literature review of the feminist thought of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), widely recognized as the pioneering feminist intellectual of colonial Bengal and a foundational figure in the discourse of feminist liberation in South Asian countries. The review also systematically analyses the academic interpretation of the major writings of Rokeya- including Sultana dream (1905), Matichur (1904), Padmarag (1924), and Avarodhbasini (1931). Based on over thirty primary and secondary sources covering feminist theory, women education advocacy, criticism of patriarchal social systems, theorisation of the agency of Muslim women, and utopian fantasy, this review identifies five thematic clusters of existing scholarship: the feminist ideology of Rokeya, her advocacy of women education, her critique of patriarchal social systems, her theorisation of the agency of Muslim women, and her utopian imagination. Through analysis, there is a great deal of scholarly consensus around the foundational importance of Rokeya as well as the identification of the critical gaps: the relative neglect of her economic thought, the underexplored of her subaltern intersectionality, the limited engagement with her prose essays in Bengali and other languages, and the absence of sustained transnational feminist comparative analysis. The paper concludes that the feminist corpus of Rokeya is in need of a new interdisciplinary approach and serves as a highly valuable, largely untapped resource in the current gender, postcolonial, and Islamic feminist theory.