Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Quick answer: Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: full summary and ending, Ladyland explained, themes of purdah reversed, and the craft of feminist utopia.
Sultana dozes in her bedroom thinking about the condition of Indian womanhood, and wakes, or seems to, in a country where the men are locked indoors and the women run everything, including the weather. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain published Sultana's Dream in 1905 in the Indian Ladies' Magazine of Madras, writing in English, her second language, reportedly to show her husband how well she had learned it. He read it and pronounced it a terrible revenge.
The author knew her subject from inside: raised in strict purdah in Bengal, she taught herself to read and write against custom, founded a school for Muslim girls that still exists, and spent her life arguing that seclusion wasted half of humanity. Sultana's Dream is that argument turned into play, one of the earliest feminist utopias anywhere, published a decade before Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, and still startlingly fresh: a satire that runs on solar power and good humour.
The story in brief, ending included
Sultana, drowsing at home, finds a visitor beside her whom she takes for her friend Sister Sara, and walks out with her into a morning city unlike any she knows: streets like gardens, no smoke, no noise, and, most bewildering of all, no men. In Ladyland, her guide explains, the sexes have traded places: the men are shut away in the mardana, the male counterpart of the zenana, where they mind babies and cook, while the women govern, farm, invent and stroll unveiled. Sultana, laughing, protests that men are stronger; Sara answers that lions are stronger than men, yet do not rule them, and walks her through the history: the country's universities, run by women, had invented marvels, a balloon that harvests water from the clouds, an instrument that collects and stores the sun's heat, while the men sneered at scientific frippery.
Then a war came. The invading army crushed the men's forces, and when defeat was certain, the Queen accepted the universities' offer: the men withdrew indoors, ostensibly to rest, and the women of the solar laboratory marched to the frontier and turned their concentrated sunlight on the enemy, who fled without a single death on either side. The men, honour-bound by their own rescue, stayed in seclusion. Since then Ladyland has run on sun and air: cultivation by electricity, travel by air-car, no railways and no paved streets, a two-hour working day, since the men, it turns out, wasted six of their eight hours smoking, religion reduced to love and truth, and crime nearly extinct, because, as Sara notes, it left with the men. The Queen receives Sultana kindly; they tour the capital by air-car, and as it descends, Sultana tumbles from her easy chair and wakes in her own bedroom, to find she had been dreaming all along. The story ends on that gentle deflation: the perfect country exists only on the far side of sleep, which is precisely Hossain's point of attack.
The characters and what they want
A guided tour needs only a handful of figures, each built for the argument.
Themes and meaning
The central device is reversal: purdah is not abolished in Ladyland but inverted, and the injustice becomes visible the instant it changes address. Exam answers should name the satire of seclusion, the claim that shutting away half of society is a waste of intelligence and labour, and the story's pairing of women's rule with science, peace and ecological order: solar heat, harvested rain, gardens for streets. Education is the load-bearing theme; the war is won not by female soldiers but by female universities, which is Hossain's real program stated as adventure.
The sharper observation is how the story handles violence. Ladyland's victory is bloodless, achieved by directed sunlight, knowledge weaponised without killing, and its crime rate falls to nothing once men are indoors: the satire needles the equation of masculinity with both protection and danger, asking who, exactly, women were being protected from. And the dream frame cuts two ways: it makes the vision safe to publish in 1905, and it indicts the present, since everything in Ladyland is explicitly ordinary science plus political will, nothing miraculous. The dream, the story implies, is a blueprint napping.
The craft: satire by guided tour
The story runs on the oldest utopian engine, the naive visitor and the patient guide, and Hossain's contribution is tone: Sara answers every objection with a homely analogy, lions and men, madmen and the sane, delivered with a smile, so the radicalism arrives wearing hospitality. The technique to steal is the objection ladder: let your visitor raise, in ascending order, exactly the protests your real audience would raise, and answer each with something concrete, an invention, a statistic, a garden. Argument becomes itinerary.
The second lesson is the value of cheerfulness in polemic. Nothing in Ladyland is bitter; the men are not punished, merely retired, and the prose keeps a lightness that makes the reversal feel like common sense rather than revenge. Writers drafting satire for a contest should note how the theme marks follow the mood: a fantasy this genial is disarming, and its one sting, that the perfect country is only a dream, lands harder for all the sweetness before it. Anyone testing a built world against Writory's September rubric will find creativity and theme are exactly what this story maximises.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, define zenana and mardana and show how the reversal makes seclusion's injustice visible.
- Cite the solar weapon and the cloud-harvesting balloon: science, not force, wins Ladyland's war.
- Place the story historically: 1905, a decade before Herland, written in the author's second language.
- Writers: structure a utopia as a guided tour, and script your sceptical visitor's objections in ascending order.
- Answer every objection with a concrete invention or arrangement, never with a sermon.
- Keep satire genial; a smiling reversal disarms readers that an angry one would lose.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which your narrator wakes inside a society that has reversed one rule of ours, about work, age, silence or space, and is shown around by a cheerful guide. Every objection the narrator raises must be answered with something concrete, and the return home must sting.
Questions
What is Ladyland in Sultana's Dream?
Ladyland is the dream country Sultana visits, where women govern and men live secluded in the mardana, the reverse of the zenana system. Run by women scientists, it uses solar heat and harvested rain, has garden streets, a two-hour working day and virtually no crime.
How do the women win the war in Sultana's Dream?
When the men's armies are defeated, the women of the science universities march to the frontier and direct concentrated sunlight from their solar instruments at the invaders, who flee. The victory is bloodless, and the men, saved by the women, remain in seclusion afterwards.
What is the message of Sultana's Dream?
Hossain argues that secluding women wastes half of society's intelligence and labour, and that education, not force, is women's path to power. By simply reversing purdah, the story makes its injustice obvious, and the dream frame hints the vision is a blueprint awaiting will, not magic.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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