Why Barbie feels like a worthy spin on Begum Rokeya's Utopian novel Sultana's Dream

“You need not be afraid of coming across a man here. This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.”

-Begum Rokeya Hossain, Sultana's Dream

A woman steps out to an alternate reality where she feels the gender roles of the heteronormative binary have been reversed. Women are scientists and capitalists while men are restricted to the household, to indulge in domestic duties. This is not just the dreamworld depicted in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but also the feminist Utopia in Begum Rokeya Hossain’s revolutionary 1905 novella Sultana’s Dream. 

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While narratives involving the reversal of gender roles have been aplenty to satirise the patriarchy and misogyny of human society, Sultana’s Dream was a trendsetter in its time. In fact, the English-language work also holds the distinction of being India’s first science fiction story and one of the earliest global examples of feminist sci-fi. 

As the title suggests, the story is about a particular dream that the protagonist Sultana has. She dreams about a world where men get to face the brunt of domestic control while women enjoy a previously unprecedented level of liberation. The women here are such advanced scientists that they have made flying cars and introduced labourless farming. Taking a jab at the Muslim practice of purdah, the story also subjects men to the confinements of their homes while hiding their faces under a veil. 

Hossain, a social reformer and writer from Bengal, wrote the story as a means to pass time whenever her magistrate husband was out of home. Freed from her duties as a wife, Hussain penned a dream-like scenario that continues to resonate among many readers to this day. 

It would seem like a stretch to compare Sultana’s Dream with Barbie but the movie makes for some interesting parallels with this piece of early 20th century literature. 

(mild spoiler alert if you still haven’t watched Barbie)

Barbie, as the trailers already suggest, deals with the titular Mattel doll stepping out of Barbieland and setting foot in the real world. Her gleeful persona gives way to a teary-eyed cynicism when she notices the real world can be a hellhole for anyone who is not a straight white man.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig takes a simplistic approach to show how men like Ryan Gosling’s Ken can feel at home in the real world while Margot Robbie’s Barbie is ogled at, spanked and heavily sexualised. Following his visit, Ken heads back to Barbieland to make his own patriarchal world (or Ken-Dom as he calls it). No longer can a Barbie become a President, a journalist, a scientist or anything else. In the new Ken-Dom, they are brainwashed to serve their male masters who only end up creating more chaos while fighting ego battles among themselves. 

Sultana’s Dream similarly poked fun at the stereotypical “dudebro” and his insecurities. Much like Barbie’s world before the Ken-Dom, the dreamscape in Sultana’s blissful dream (or Ladyland as Hossain writes) is a society where crime is eliminated because it was mostly the men who were responsible for it. 

Similarly, just like how Barbie shows its Ken-Dom’s Kens opening up beers and talking about horses, Sultana’s Dream shows that the successful women-led society only has working days of two hours (instead of a longer duration as men used to waste over six hours in just smoking cigarettes). 

While Barbie has drawn universal acclaim since ‘Barbenheimer Day’, some audiences were also put off by Gerwig’s feminist critique of patriarchy and capitalism as just scratching the surface. On the other side, there are opinions, which this viral tweet sums up, "You are adults searching for political validation in a 2-hour-long advertisement for Mattel products." 

Regardless of whether Barbie’s socio-political overtones are groundbreaking or not, the real-life Kens are naturally pissed. From calling it “an anti-men campaign” to “a pink acid trip that will turn men gay”, the so-called “meninist” demographic is bound to be pissed off. 

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While not much is known about Sultana’s Dream’s reception ever since it was first published in The Indian Ladies Magazine, it wouldn’t have been surprising if some men of Hossain’s era felt attacked. Hossain still hailed from a rich landowning family in Bengal and her husband was also mostly supportive of her endeavours. So, perhaps, the criticism wouldn’t have been harsher. Gerwig herself is having the moment of her career as Barbie has broken the opening weekend record for a female-directed solo venture, earning $155 million at its domestic box office in three days. 

Both Hossain and Gerwig belong to different backgrounds and created works of fiction with vastly different regional contexts. But their central premise and the creators’ satirical disdain towards the male agents of patriarchy are interestingly similar. One can only hope that Gerwig picks up a copy of Hossain’s novella sometime and gives it a read. 

Gerwig also doesn’t need to worry about any underlying meaning that gets simplified with an English translation as Hossain wrote the original Sultana’s Dream in the colonial language. Legend has it that Hossain was initially tutored only in Urdu and restricted from learning Bangla and English. A 25-year-old Begum Rokeya, however, mastered both tongues and even intentionally wrote Sultana’s Dream in English to show her proficiency in the language. This universality of Hossain's writing should only make her book more accessible for global studies