Begum Rokeya, who weaponised humour to trigger the great masculine meltdown
She was, without contest, the first woman to weaponise wit so effectively that the masculine-industrial complex of the subcontinent felt personally attacked, and evidently, still does.
Some women write. Some women revolt. And then there is Begum Rokeya - who, with nothing more than a pen dipped in grace, humour, and unfathomable intelligence, managed to make generations of insecure men burst into tears long before the emoji existed.
Few figures in South Asian history have managed to offend insecure men across multiple centuries, but Begum Rokeya holds a special place in that elite hall of fame.
She was, without contest, the first woman to weaponise wit so effectively that the masculine-industrial complex of the subcontinent felt personally attacked, and evidently, still does.
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Imagine a 25-year-old woman (who did not even have access to formal education) in 1905 writing a feminist utopia where men are locked inside their own intellectual limitations - oh pardon, I mean "mardana quarters". Imagine the audacity.
No wonder the extremist men are still crying: their great-great-grandfathers never emotionally recovered.
Throughout history, nothing has made fundamentalists cry harder than a woman with a functioning prefrontal cortex.
A short story. Barely a few pages long. Yet powerful enough to send generations of patriarchal masculinity into cardiac arrest.
Let us begin with the evidence.
Whenever women in the subcontinent tried to enter public life - education, writing, political organising - the first people to gather at the gates and scream "fitna!" were the gatekeepers of masculine insecurity: the extremist men.
This is not conjecture; Leila Ahmed, in "Women and Gender in Islam", outlines how clerical anxieties historically target women's mobility as a means of safeguarding patriarchal privilege. Deniz Kandiyoti calls it the "patriarchal bargain" - men cling to their dominance because it's their only source of status. Rokeya threatened that bargain merely by existing.
Enter "Sultana's Dream" (1905).
A short story. Barely a few pages long. Yet powerful enough to send generations of patriarchal masculinity into cardiac arrest.
What did she do?
She described a world where women use science, intellect, solar energy, and administrative efficiency to run society smoothly, while men sit indoors, whining, smoking, and contributing nothing.
Yes, the same pattern was later confirmed by the World Economic Forum gender gap data: societies where women are empowered tend to be more stable, less violent, and better governed.
Rokeya predicted this in 1905. The extremists have been crying since.
One century later, in a Bangladesh wrapped in WiFi signals and existential dread, a university professor, armed with a physics degree and zero self-awareness, discovers that Begum Rokeya still haunts the fragile ego of the subcontinent like a benevolent ghost of enlightenment.
He calls her a "murtad", as if the word is a talisman, as if shouting it into the void might protect him from confronting the real terror: a woman who thinks.
Throughout history, nothing has made fundamentalists cry harder than a woman with a functioning prefrontal cortex.
One cannot blame him entirely. Our poor men have been trembling for generations.
Rokeya had that effect.
Her language was a dangerous thing - neat, precise, elegant, and sharp enough to slice through centuries of patriarchal nonsense. She never needed to shout; her sentences did the heavy lifting. And that is precisely why men like him panic.
Nothing frightens an insecure man more than a woman who dismantles him without raising her voice.
Rokeya's humour and the great masculine meltdown
When she mocks men who "cannot even pass thread through a needlehole", she is capturing the cognitive dissonance of a culture where men with zero domestic competence claim divine authority over women's lives.
When she flips purdah and locks men inside, she is enacting Gayle Rubin's sex-gender system in reverse: demonstrating that gendered seclusion is not sacred doctrine but social construction.
When she shows women innovating in STEM, she prefigures the empirical finding (UNESCO data) that women excel in science when systemic barriers are removed.
Her satire worked because it exposed the truth. And nothing terrifies fragile masculinity more than evidence.
Rokeya understood early on what Judith Butler would later articulate, what Nancy Fraser theorised, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak dissected - that patriarchy is not simply a structure; it is a performance, a fragile theatre that collapses the moment someone points out the absurdity of the props. And Rokeya, with her gentle smile and quiet defiance, simply tugged at the curtains.
Her satire did what no sermon, no slogan, no street protest could: it laughed. And patriarchy, bless its brittle bones, does not know what to do when a woman laughs.
For centuries, it has been known how to silence women who cry, but women who laugh? That is the apocalypse.
Nothing frightens an insecure man more than a woman who dismantles him without raising her voice.
In "Sultana's Dream", Rokeya's wit unmasks the ridiculousness of male self-importance. She inverts the purdah system, flips the script, and forces male authority to face itself in a mirror so grotesque that even today's extremists are still screaming, "Haram!" from underneath layers of insecurity.
What makes her humour lethal is its decency.
Rokeya never descended into vulgarity, not because she could not, but because she did not need to. She was practising what Fraser would call transformative recognition: exposing injustice while offering new imaginaries.
Her language walked with dignity even while it trampled the ego of the oppressor. And nothing threatens the insecure masculine psyche more than a woman who defeats him gracefully.
Poor men, forever threatened
Even today, when (if) an extremist man reads Rokeya, he does not see her logic. He does not see her brilliance. He sees only the collapse of his own imagined authority. Some would call it a crisis of hegemonic masculinity. I call it a tantrum.
And so, over a century after she wrote about solar-powered peace and women who govern with intellect instead of impulse, the extremist men are still banging their fists on Facebook posts, choking on their own outrage, typing "kafir" with trembling fingers as if the word might save them from the intellectual bankruptcy Rokeya already diagnosed in 1905.
The truth is simple: it is not her ideas that make them cry. It is the fact that she had them.
What makes her humour lethal is its decency.
For men accustomed to being the sole authors of religion, morality, and public life, a woman with a mind is a catastrophe. A woman with humour is a scandal. A woman with theoretical grounding is a crisis. And a woman whose legacy continues to thrive despite their howling? That is pure heartbreak.
Male dominance in South Asia has always relied on exaggerating men's moral superiority. Rokeya laughed at it. That alone was unforgivable.
This is why a physics professor in 2025 is still screaming "kafir!" into Facebook like an overgrown toddler. Not because Rokeya is dangerous, but because she proves how redundant he is.
Begum Rokeya never sought to make men cry. She only asked that women be seen as human beings - educated, dignified, capable. But patriarchy, in its eternal fragility, mistook her decency for rebellion, her humour for blasphemy, her intelligence for threat.
And thus, quite unintentionally, she became the first woman in the subcontinent to make the extremists cry - not out of pain, but out of the dawning realisation that their monopoly over knowledge was never as absolute as they believed.
And if they cry harder, so be it.
Rokeya built a world where women walk freely under the sun. If the price of that illumination is a few damp beards and trembling turbans, history will happily pay it.
Zarin Tasnim is an Online journalist at The Business Standard
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard
