Afterword

Abstract

This concluding chapter examines the idealized Indian society through a feminist lens. It first begins with a summary of the major themes introduced in the previous chapters. Afterward, the chapter analyzes a work by a now well-known woman writer from Calcutta, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, an early feminist thinker in India. Her short story “Sultana's Dream” (1905), is celebrated for its radical world-making of a society where women rule the outside world and seclude men in the home. From there, the chapter turns to another dreamscape concerned with the condition of Indian womanhood—S. C. Mookerjee's book, The Decline and Fall of the Hindus (1919), his study on the evolution of modern Indian society based in the ideals of Aryan society.