indian literature
Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s short story Sultana’s Dream is a brief text, but its complexities and nuances make it a critical part of the utopian canon.[1] The narrative follows the titular Sultana as she explores an advanced feminist society called Ladyland, with the ambiguous ending leaving questions to whether it was an alternate reality or a dream (as the title suggests). Both possibilities lead to the same hopeful call for active change in her own world.
The post-World War II novels of the Bengali writer S. N. (Sudhin or Sudhindra Nath) Ghose (1899–1965) received critical recognition in India, Europe, and the United States; however, the short stories and plays he published in London in the early 1920s have been largely neglected. He published stories in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, and literary magazine, Germinal, which comprise some of the earliest examples of fiction written in English by a South Asian author and published in Britain.[1] They appeared several years before his more famous contemporary Mulk Raj Anand published his first short story, “The Lost Child,” produced on Eric Gill’s handpress in County Buckinghamshire.[2] While Anand’s interactions with writers in Britain have recently been recognized within modernist studies, Ghose’s literary activities in London in the 1920s have been almost entirely forgotten.