Sultana's Reality - An interactive multimedia story

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

Sultana’s Reality is an interactive multimedia story that explores the relationship between women and the colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, women’s writing and history.

Following an Alice in Wonderland style adventure the interactive multimedia installation brings to life accounts of different women – who would rather nap than read, who were stoned in the streets for wearing shoes and carrying umbrellas, who read forbidden texts in secret at night, who read and then challenged the very ideas they read… and those who went on to write books - telling their story in their own words. The books they wrote reveal a universe of women’s lives as they were actually lived – outside the confines of bad and good behavior. The women in the books and the books in the women were full of messiness, intimacy, cynicism, humor, anger, dreams, beauty and love - and all of it together makes up their history, and this story.

The imagining of feminist utopia focuses on whether a gender equal utopia can exist. A world without patriarchal oppression and gender binaries which is beyond the violence gender itself produces within the lives of people, a feminist utopia imagines a world without gender binaries and gender discrimination.

Radical feminism explains that a feminist utopia cannot exist if inequalities exist due to gender binaries and discrimination. It advocates for imagining a feminist utopia which provides a critique of gender itself.

Although Rokeya Sakhawat Begum’s work Sultana’s Dream is a feminist attempt at imagining a feminist utopia, named ‘Ladyland’, the story in itself draws a lot of inspiration from her own life experiences as a Muslim girl child born to an upper class Muslim family. The women of the family were under strict observance of Purdah system that secluded them to the domestic realm.

 He encouraged Rokeya to write in Bengali which will help her to connect with the common people and she later published Motichur in 1905 and Sultana’s Dream in 1908.

"Sultana’s Dream is based on an imagined Ladyland where women Can access public spaces unrestricted by social or religious customs."

Concept of Andermehel- the universe of women :-

" women who read were often resented by older women in the house."

From being shut away in 'andarmahals' or inner chambers, where they had limited contact with the outside world, how did Indian women get to where we are today?

At the tech-art festival 'Be Fantastic Bengaluru', visitors got to explore the relationship between women and books in India through an interactive multimedia art project titled 'Sultana's Reality'.

The project by Bengaluru artist Afrah Shafiq uses archival images to tell the fascinating stories of women who were stoned for carrying umbrellas, who secretly read forbidden texts, and those who challenged these texts.  

Unlike history lectures, the experience is immersive as the viewer gets to interact with the story which follows Sultana as she goes back in time. Wit, sarcasm, captivating animation and images keep the viewer engaged.

Observation of females and their connection with book :-

"I spent two months going through all the fascinating images they had from paintings to matchbox labels. I was interested to see how women were depicted and I started seeing patterns. There were so many pictures of women daydreaming, which was funny. The men are never shown this way," Afrah said.

Alongside, Afrah was also reading about the author of a 1905 book 'Sultana's Dream', Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain who was a pioneer of women's education. That inspired Afrah to trace the history of women and books in India, with an interactive storyboard.

Afrah plans to take the project to a few more festivals before making it accessible to the public on a website.

She also hopes to take 'Sultana's Reality' into classrooms. "I want to make it an educational project, maybe try to make it a module in college. Students could do research and then add stories to it," she said.

Compare both narrative :- 

we can see that both stories are very interesting. Sultana's Reality in the  use of music and image ,sound girl who read the book. Sultana's Dream is a very interesting and fiminist story.