Inside Tarini Bhavan: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Padmarag and the Richness of South Asian Feminism in Furthering Unsectarian Gender-Just Human Development

The first section of this essay considers the personal narratives of suffering and growth of the Tarini Bhavan workers and inmates. The second section analyses the ideological contours of the reformist, gentlewoman-centred feminist project in the novella. The third section is devoted more specifically to Rokeya’s humorous, realistic account of working women leading and administering an educative and philanthropic institution. The fourth section focuses on the eponymous heroine of the work, Padmarag/ Siddika/ Zainab. The fifth examines the striking and unusual ending of the work, in which Rokeya refuses to give her heroine the conventional ending of the courtship novel, and rejects marriage and heterosexual domesticity as the telos of women’s lives: she explodes the romance-style courtship narrative in which the highminded, well-educated, suffering young woman is reabsorbed into the world of patriarchal domesticity.