Vision Of Begum Rokeya and Present Educational Status Of Muslim Women In West Bengal : A Textual Analysis

Begum Rokeya was Bengal’s first Muslim feminist thinker, writer and educationist. She has a great contribution on women’s independence and education. She confessed that the women specially the Muslim women are deprived and they don’t have the minimum courageous attitude to face the challenges of daily life. For the lack of proper education, they have lost their self-confidence. She tried to educate the women so that they can use it as a weapon to rejuvenate themselves in the modern society. In Islam, women hold a prestigious place but in practice, it is not very common in the current world due to the discrimination and patriarchal attitude. She realized that women have been suffering a lot but no voices are arising against it. Rokeya tried to make people understand about the rights and freedom of women. Her one and only vision was to educate the women so that they would reach their fullest potentials as a human being and do the necessary things according to their own interest without depending on men. She mainly focused on expansion of female education in the Bengali Muslim society. She strongly believed that proper education would enlighten women and liberate their selves from the barriers of rigid patriarchal and sexist norms. She always raised her voice against discrimination and any type of torturing of women. Her main target was to emancipate the women of Bengal. She has a lot of activities for empowering women but the real fact is that she did not have any formal education or training. This paper seeks to analyze the vision of Begum Rokeya and educational status of Muslim women in West Bengal. The observer tries to explore it using various primary and secondary sources like documents analysis, research articles, books, newspapers etc.