Our religion is based on Love and Truth. It is our religious duty to love one another and to be absolutely truthful.
In this description of Ladyland's religion, Sister Sara emphasizes the ideal, utopian nature of Ladyland that is created when men are restricted from entering or acting in the public sphere. Without men, religion becomes a practice that is dominated by love and truth, which also implies that with men, religion is the opposite—a tool for oppression or violence.
In India man is lord and master. He has taken to himself all powers and privileges and shut up the woman in the zenana.
Sultana's response to Sister Sara when Sister Sara asks how men and women interact in her home country outlines the patriarchal power structure that women face in India. The practice of purdah, during which women are restricted to zenanas, oppresses the women and strips them of their agency.
While the women were engaged in scientific researches, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power.
The story sets up a contrast between two fields: science and military power. In the end, it is women, armed with scientific innovation and engineering, who are able to win the war against the invading country and utilize non-violent methods to push the men into the zenanas. They go on to use science to improve their society and eradicate violence, accidental death, and natural disasters, establishing a utopia.
They should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit or nothing.
Sister Sara condemns men (the "they" in this quote refers to men) for their inability to do anything. This statement is emblematic of one of the story's recurrent themes, which is the belief that men can accomplish little and that society will improve without them.
They mean that you are shy and timid like men.
In describing Sultana as "mannish" when she is timid and shy, Sister Sara reverts the expectation that women are timid and shy by associating Sultana's behavior with men. Over the course of the story, expectations for men and women are reversed and inverted, from the overall structure of the society (women roaming free, men imprisoned) it portrays to the language it uses ("mannish" meaning shy).
Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shup up in the zenana!
Sister Sara explicitly condemns the practice of purdah, during which women are shut up in zenanas—a practice that Sister Sara outlines as unfair by characterizing the women who are "shut up" as innocent. Men are characterized as brutish and violent, and only in Ladyland are the women able to retaliate and reverse their own fortune by imprisoning the men.
You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.
Although much of "Sultana's Dream" assigns the blame for female oppression to men, Sister Sara also alludes to the role that women play in their own subjugation. She accuses women of neglecting their own rights and surrendering their agency, something that she accuses Sultana of doing as well. In Ladyland, on the other hand, women are able to exercise their rights and power, free from male power structures and threats.
