Project Ladyland: Sultana dreams again, 121 years later

Begum Rokeya's Sultana's Dream has survived a century of being shrunk — into a syllabus entry, a feminist footnote, a curiosity of early sci-fi — when it was always something larger than any of those boxes. It is one of the earliest works of feminist science fiction, if not the earliest, written in English by a Muslim woman in purdah in 1905, imagining a world where men were confined indoors and women ran the state through solar power, science and reason. 

Rokeya wrote satire because satire was perhaps the sharpest weapon available to her. By reversing the gendered order of her own society, she exposed the absurdity of treating women's seclusion as natural or necessary. But underneath that inversion sits a quieter question: what happens to the memory of oppression once the oppression ends?

If women inherited the state tomorrow, would they govern from reason alone? Or would the psychological burden of centuries under patriarchy continue to shape how they moved through power — whom they trusted, what they feared, and what they considered necessary for protection?

Begum Rokeya gave us the world after patriarchy. She imagined women free from the structure that oppressed them; she left us to think about what remains after the structure disappears — the trauma, instincts and inherited fears produced by having lived under them for generations.

That is the difficulty of returning to Ladyland now. A utopia written as satire ages strangely. The technologies through which Rokeya imagined women's liberation belonged to a very specific colonial-patriarchal moment; returning to them today means asking not only what technology can free us from, but also what kinds of power it can reproduce. That question feels different in a world shaped by climate collapse, algorithmic surveillance and a patriarchy that has learned to adapt.

That is the trick of Ladyland — it was never really about men. It was about inversion as a method, about asking a reader to feel, physically, what it is to be confined "for your own safety." So Project Ladyland, set 121 years after Rokeya's, keeps the inversion but changes its terms. Men have since been granted rights back into public life, but under a new condition: the Sunset Law. 

The team spent a long time imagining what a genuinely matriarchal, non-patriarchal society would look like in practice, not just in principle — down to how men would move through it. Would they be calmer because power no longer demanded that they perform dominance? Would dress, gesture, even posture soften once they were no longer trained to occupy space by default?

Rokeya's Ladyland was technologically advanced, but its imagination of technology still carried some of the hierarchies of its time — progress was largely framed through mastery over nature and technological advancement. Project Ladyland 2026 wanted to rethink that relationship too. A decolonised Ladyland, the team felt, could not simply change who held power; it also had to change how power related to the natural world. It had to be ecologically restored — a place where the relationship between people and the environment was no longer extractive.

That is where the play's technology comes from: nothing gleaming or imported, but everything upcycled, repaired and regrown. Ladyland's props are built entirely from recycled and discarded materials, imagining a waste-management system that treats what has been thrown away not as waste, but as raw material for the world it wants to build next.

But utopia, once you interrogate it, produces friction — and Project Ladyland 2026 refuses to smooth that over. The central tension of the production is a live question, not a settled one: should men be granted night rights? The men of Ladyland, having tasted a version of the confinement women have historically lived under, now push back against their own mardana. It is Rokeya's satire folded back on itself, a hundred and twenty-one years on, asking whether any inversion of power ever really escapes the shape of the thing it replaced.

Produced by HerStory Foundation with support from the British Council's Women of the World (WOW) Foundation Grant, Project Ladyland 2026 is not staged as a fixed narrative but as a participatory one — the audience's choices shape how the struggle over the Sunset Law unfolds each night. The production and vision come from Katerina Don, with Bappy Ameen as production manager, Wajed Al-Rahman leading staging direction, and Shovan Shurjo handling choreographer and codirector. The arts team for the production includes Urukku.Bangladesh, Tarannum NIbir, Manzoor Real and Faiza Fairooz. The script was written by Zohra Binte Zaman, Anika Bushra Shoshee, Nafisa A Iqbal and myself with editorial support from the HerStory team.

The first performance took place on 13 August, to a full house. Bibek, a narrator-like figure rooted in the theatrical traditions of the region, moved between the stage and the audience, connecting the two. The Bibek also invited the audience to participate in Ladyland's fate by voting for or against the Sunset Law.

Male and female audience members were seated in two separate sections of the hall, an intentional choice that reflected the play's central question: if gendered power structures are reversed, how much does the distinction itself really change? The separation also made the audience's votes on the Sunset Law visibly gendered, as men and women occupied different parts of the room.

The production took stage again on 14 August, at Bangladesh Mahila Samity. It will then travel to Chattogram for performances on 24 and 25 August at the Theatre Institute, Chattogram.