For Bread and Roses: The Radical Possibilities of Politics of Friendship in Postcapitalist Society

In 1905 as India was in the thick of colonial attempts at reformation, and the nationalist liberation movement against British imperialism, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Muslim woman from Bengal wrote a story ‘Sultana’s Dream’. As debates on women’s rights - abolition of sati, widow remarriage, women’s education, age of consent, religious rituals raged in 19th century India- Rokeya spinned tales on the idyllic Ladyland of two hour workdays, solar technologies, community kitchens, lush gardens, and collective care, nurturance, friendship - a country where women were in charge, and where friendship not family or blood kinship bound people to each other in an imagined homeland. Whereas, friendship had historically occupied a central idea in the construction of the polity in political philosophy; female friendships have always slipped through these cracks, with women being mostly written out of this ‘polity’. Yet, the idea of friendship lurked, in Marxist feminist idea of ‘love-comradeship’, in feminist contestations of marriage, family, gendered division of roles, and heteropatriarchy.

While the recent emergence of friendship studies harps on the idea of political friendships and deliberates on the politics of feminist friendships, it fails to locate the radical possibilities that friendship posits in bringing the struggle against heteropatriarchy in conjunction with the struggle against private property. It is in this context that this paper seeks to look at Rokeya’s speculative fiction as one of the first ruminations on the radical possibilities of care and friendship in South Asia. In unpacking the ideas of friendship planted by Rokeya, and reading it with the feminist movement in India, and the explorations of the idea of friendship and care within the movement, this paper will try to look at the radical possibilities a politics of feminist friendship opens up in post capitalist explorations of social relations in the brave new world.