Sultana's Reality - An Interactive Multimedia Story

This Blog-post is a response to Sunday Reading on 'Sultana's Reality - an interactive multimedia story' given by Yesha Bhatt Ma'am. 

We can find such a huge number of feminist thinkers and writers in history. They all in some way suffered or felt the concern about females in society and under the context of liberation. From the ancient to the modern world of thinking and the ground of literature become very popular with critical thinking and debating while talking about a woman. 

On our first day of the Master Program, Semester 3, we saw one very interesting short film, 'Sultana's Dream' written by Begum Rokeya Hussain who is regarded as a pioneer of women's liberation. She is popularly known as Begum Rokeya lived a short, yet meaningful life. A Bengali writer and activist, she has often been touted as the pioneer feminist of Bengal. A fierce advocate of gender equality, Rokeya wrote many short stories, novels, poems, satire, and essays, calling for women to be treated equally to men. She held the lack of education to be responsible for women lagging behind men in her writings. (feminism in India)

Sultana's Dream is a utopian story that describes the dream seen by Sultana and is about feminist utopian land, (Ladyland) where all women were working and all men were locked in a room. Those all men were far away from technology and other things made by women. 

Afra Shafiq is a visual artist who was inspired by Rokeya's story and created the digital story named, 'Sultana's Reality.' She generated the digital narration-based story on 18 December 2017. 

Concept of Andarmehel – the universe of Women:

As there described in this image, 

"The Andarmahal was a space that women could not step out of, but it was also a space that men would not step into. An all-women space, free from surveillance, for women across class to do, say and behave as they pleased..." 

In Chapter one - an inner world of their own. Andarmahal is the universe of women in which all women are free from any restrictions given by their husbands and society also. They allow doing whatever they want to do. Here the creator, Afra Shafiq used various real images which she has taken from history and some also convert into motion images that like tell the real story through one image.

The women who all were had their voices but they didn't speak against patriarchal discourse. But time and again they speak out about all their freedom and their rights to education. This concept suggests their freedom under the patriarchal or social voices. 

Observations of females and their connection with books:( Colonial Education movement)

In other chapters, we found that there was time to move toward introducing women's inner talent and their rights to study and to serve others whatever they kept. This is the impact of the colonization of the British Empire on India. However, after knowing that women are going to educate themselves by destroying their so-called homemade rules for women, men used to meet each other and try to solve through the books which spoke about how women should behave in their home, with their husbands and family. Though some women like to return to their old roots. 

Compare both narratives: 

Sultan's Dream is the story of the utopian world, while Sultana's reality is the prequel to another one. Sultana's Dream is a very interesting and feminist thinking-based story. While Reality shows the dream but in another way. Here we can find that by using technology and other things, Afra made quite an interesting combination between the ages with real photographs and some real voices of political leaders who many times made promises to people and somewhere they also support patriarchal society to stay in their possession. Use of music, loading image, the arrow was the girl who read the book. In the end, we can see that the girl is sleeping, but in the short story, Sultana is waking up and the dream ends here we can add our story also.

Instead, the digital narration with animation is quite interesting in the digital era because nowadays few people are interested to read the story.