ABSTRACT As an insightful literary text exploring segments of labyrinthine South Asian peoples’ history, Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khwabnama (1996, the title translates as “The Narrative of Dreams”) is a fictional account of peasantry around the beel (marshlands) regions of present-day northern Bangladesh. The novel is set against the Tebhaga movement of the 1940s that demanded two-thirds share of the crops for landless sharecroppers. This is to be read in the light of the emergent (East) Pakistan movement that peddled dreams of Muslim subaltern ascendancy, once Partition had displaced predominant Hindu landlords. The bulk of Elias’ characters are, however, “the colonised subaltern subject(s),” who undergo only a de-facto transference of thralldom under nouveau riche Muslim landowners. Contrary to vaunted dreams (khwab) therefore, the poor peasants were never to emerge into any centrality of power equations. From the perspective of gendered subaltern representation, Khwabnama explores Elias’ partial dismantling of the sexual division of labour that Gayatri Spivak disavows as a colonial and phallocentric construct. Notwithstanding that the majority of women characters are hemmed in by mundaneness and carnality, and lack agency to approximate the cultural or political aspirations of their male counterparts; there are still a few who are physically strong and equal sharers with men in agrarian productivity. In the light of these observations, this paper reads Khwabnama as a text of masculinity that attempts a recreation of subaltern history, while effacing the “itinerary of the subaltern” female, at a critical juncture of Bangladeshi historiography.