Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part I (2025)

The given paper revisits two classic works of women writing in Bengali, Rassundari Devi (1868/1897) Amar Jiban and Sultana’s Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, to follow a path of feminist self-expression that traverses the divine interiority to the rational utopia. Based on the lessons of feminist-theological readings of Amar Jiban (with an especial focus on Embodied Devotion and Feminist Knowledge in Colonial Bengal), the paper claims that Rassundari secret literacy is a theology of homemade piety, in which the knowledge process becomes a religious experience instead of a secular reform action. Her statement that God had all this planned makes a theological principle of agency in practice, which is to submit, making the submission itself become epistemic freedom. Inheriting this theological grammar, Rokeya restructures it into rational feminist ethics in Sultana Dreams, whereby knowledge takes the place of grace as the moral basis of justice. The paper conceptualizes negotiated agency as a theological and intellectual practice whereby the Bengali women were able to express both divine and rational power within the limits of patriarchy and colonialism. It contends that one can see a continuum between the domestic theology of Rassundari and the social rationalism of Rokeya and that it was not a break but a transition a step between concealed devotion and open enlightenment. The texts of South Asian feminist theology of the everyday, which together form an indigenous South Asian feminist theology of the everyday, are not opposites, but are modes of relational knowing.