Considerations on Utopia, Partition, and Bengali women’s writing and activism

The concepts of memory and utopia are valuable in understanding such refractions, assemblages, and re-assemblages of womanhood in the context of the multiple partitions of Bengal. At the core of this article are early twentieth- and twenty-first-century Bengali women writers and activists, such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, who mentored and inspired subsequent women utopian authors, concluding with a discussion of left-wing activist Noorjahan Bose’s Agunmukhar Meye (2011). The analysis attempts to understand how new transnational and diasporic cultural memory is forged in a way that acknowledges the ruptures forged by Partition, and which pays tribute to these women, who banded together in a desire for the elusive utopian.