Chitra Ganesh | Sultana's Dream

2018

Sultana's Dream: The Condition of Womanhood

Chitra Ganesh and Durham Press have completed a new portfolio of twenty-seven relief prints, titled Sultana's Dream, in an edition of thirty-five. Inspired by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's early twentieth-century story of the same title, the prints – all black linocuts on BFK Rives 280gsm tan paper – employ Hossain's text, imagery, and themes to explore urgent topics of the political present.

Hossain's 1905 short story begins in reverie: "One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood." The narrator soon is led on an oneiric stroll through Ladyland, a utopian matriarchy where women have harnessed the power of the sun to live prosperously and efficiently. Education and compassion for refugees are paramount, and men remain indoors, in domestic spaces.

Ganesh literally interprets certain moments from this pioneering work of feminist science fiction: the opening scene in the easy chair, for example, or a military battle won by wielding an inventive solar weapon. Other images describe and build upon Ladyland's architecture and environment, further elucidating the vivid atmosphere that Hossain created.

Far from merely illustration, however, the portfolio, in the artist's words, "connects with problems shaping twenty-first-century life: apocalyptic environmental disaster, the disturbing persistence of gender-based inequality, the power of the wealthy few against the economic struggles of the majority, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts that cause widespread death and suffering." Like much of Ganesh's work, Sultana's Dream engages these subjects through the lens of history, literature, and mythology not only to examine the relationship between imagined and lived worlds but also to consider how utopian fantasies might be realized.

The prints are available as a boxed portfolio, which includes a booklet with an introduction by the author, Hossain's story and a critical essay by Saisha Grayson, a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Individual works are also available, though on a limited basis.
“This project is inspired by Sultana’s Dream, a utopian text conceived in 1905 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, an early Bengali feminist author and social reformer. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English. Sultana’s Dream was completed over the course of an afternoon. First published in the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, a women’s literary journal based in Madras, the story appeared ten years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic feminist utopian novel Herland. Sultana’s Dream, though not as well known, holds a singular position among early feminist science fiction. This series of prints draws on Hossain’s vibrant imagery, translat-ing a narrative written in verse into a visual grammar that connects with problems shaping twenty-first-century life: apocalyptic environmental disaster, the disturbing persistence of gender-based inequality, the power of the wealthy few against the economic struggles of the majority, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts that cause widespread death and suffering. Created in print — a medium that is historically foundational to the idea of public discourse — these works comment through form and content on this fraught moment in the world, demonstrating the enduring relevance of feminist utopian imaginaries in offering an invaluable means of envisioning a more just future.” – Chitra Ganesh

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DEFERRED, BUT STILL DESIRED: SULTANA'S DREAM, 1905 AND 2018

by Saisha Grayson, PhD, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

"When I first wrote about Chitra Ganesh’s work, I was looking at the self-published zine version of her Tales of Amnesia (2002). These low-budget booklets mimicked the look and feel of the popular comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), which appeared in the late 1960s to promote a nationalist, Hindu identity to English-speak-ing children in India and throughout the diaspora. Manipulating individual cells sourced from across ACK’s decades of production, Ganesh constructed a new, elliptical narrative, fashioned from surreally altered images and poetically reimagined texts. Her contemporary, feminist, and queer détournement of the conformist comics, I argued, also reclaimed a pre-colonial South Asian sensibility – embedded in the region’s mythic and literary traditions – that understood women as mysterious, powerful, shape-shifting goddess-queen-lovers.

Ganesh’s suite of prints Sultana’s Dream (2018) is a fascinating counterpart to that earlier project. Once again created with sequenced storytelling in mind, these compositions far more faithfully track along with their historic source, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s visionary parable of the same title. Instead of deconstructing and rerouting, Ganesh here imaginatively, lovingly, lushly expands upon the Bengali writer’s 1905 afternoon reverie. The prints give Hossain’s words a visual and cultural presence at a moment when they could not be more needed, poignantly illustrating the continuity between the author’s hundred-year-old science-fiction fantasy and what today still feels like distant utopian desires for gender equity, individual virtue, social justice, international peace, and planetary survival. At the same time, Ganesh’s turn to this South Asian source effects a similar destabilization of colonialist, Western-centric trajectories of where radical political potentiality lies. By introducing “Sultana’s Dream” to inter-national art audiences, Ganesh posits an education and women’s rights activist who was multilingual, Muslim, and operating under colonial rule as a foremother for speculative feminist fiction – as a precursor to Charlotte Per-kins Gilman’s remarkably comparable separatist novel Herland (1915) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its 2017 televisual interpretation. At the same time, Ganesh’s conscious determination, in this and other recent projects, to “disaggregate an interest in mythology from the iconography of Hinduism,” whether by drawing from Bengali literature or Himalayan Buddhist art, again refutes a Hindutva nationalism bent on violently erasing the multicultural realities of the subcontinent.

Also interesting are the aesthetic shifts seen in Sultana’s Dream, in contrast not only to Tales of Amnesia but also to Ganesh’s many other prints and paintings that use ACK imagery as a springboard. Most obviously, instead of using the psychedelic colors of the comic series, these linocuts rely on black, tan, and the subtle gradations between them to convey their powerful visions. Rather than just existing as a stage for action, then, the environ-mental and architectural elaborations of Ladyland become a prominent character in the compositions, as they are in Hossain’s story. This assertion of the relational, not the individual, as the foundation, the fabric, of a different social order is in this way embedded in the formal structure of Ganesh’s project . . . as we know it must be for any movement toward a more just, sustainable, and Ladyland-like future. "
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