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This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism and patriarchy, and created innovative educational discourses and practices. The history of education is inscribed not merely in the formal school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger career as writer and builder of women's associations. An analysis of the enmeshing of women's writing and women's networks thus yields a creative, nuanced history of women's education. This paper also connects micro-histories and macro-histories of women's education, correlating macro-level data about Indian non-governmental agency in advancing female education with the work of individual figures such as Rokeya. The paper analyses Rokeya's novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”), showing that the integrated paradigm of women's educational and welfarist work found here has many similarities with the actual educational-welfarist work done by women such as Ramabai, Sarala Ray, or Abala Bose. Through her activities and writing, often made in alliance with other educating women such as Sarala, Rokeya gave voice to ideologies and views widely at variance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British colonial officialdom. The paper also shows that women of different races and religions formed networks and alliances, in the transnational British Empire, to further women's emancipation and education, in bodies such as All India Women's Conference and Bengal Women's Education League. The paper recognises how much women such as Rokeya were able to actually be and actually do in achieving social change in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity." — Michel Foucault (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews). Gajan is a Bengali festival which is a combination of Foucauldian concept of multidirectional functioning of power structure, transgression and Bakhtinian concept of Carnival. This festival gives the subaltern masses the power of subverting every establishment, institutions of superstructures, order of hierarchy, and every form of classification possible- in terms of gender, caste, race, dialect, religion and law. It invokes the surreal state of mind were all barriers that separate the rational from the irrational collapses, leading to a random state of mind. It is the liberation of the libido, trapped desire for the 'Other' and an open display of the Freudian 'unconscious'. Gajan generally deals with the liberation of two kinds of marginalized groups: the namasudra (the caste of untouchables) and women. It portrays a woman who can be angry, thirsty, ferocious, warrior like almost giving men an 'anti-penis envy'. The aim of my paper is to deconstruct the fertility rites an its association with the castration complex, the various fissures and silences in the mythmaking of Gajan, its rites evolving gradually as a taboo, the issue of transgenderism, the eruption of the unconscious, its gradual marginalization and disappearance from a psychoanalytical, political anthropological matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]