Some Reflections About Bengali Culture and Traditions from the Feminist Perspective, Part I

An interview by Wiola Rebecka, PhD with Shumu Haque, feminist, activist, poet, and a voracious reader

Wiola Rebecka: Could you please tell us about Bangladesh and Bengali culture?

Shumu Haque: Bengali culture gets its roots from at least a few thousand years of secular culture; most of which pre-dates Islam and Aryan civilization in the Indian sub-continent. The earliest known trace of civilization in this land is from at least 3500 to 4000 years ago. 

While a lot of that has been destroyed, thanks to the imperial aggression of the colonial era, some of that craftsmanship sustains in the form of Muslin and Jamdani craftsmanship and the rich heritage of Bengali literature and language, a language that is currently the fifth most-spoken native language and the sixth most-spoken language by total number of speakers in the world.

Sadly, as Islamic Fundamentalist tendencies gain more and more importance in thecountry, the more secular tendencies of the Bengali culture are being pushed away and out of the public sphere of life.

Could you please tell us about the positions and roles of women in this culture?

In the beginning of the country, women had a much more active role in Bangladeshi society. 

However, after the liberation war, as the country saw one military coup after another, the scenario changed. In a bid to claim their legitimacy on power, all of these military juntas heavily relied on religion.

The change was not quite so evident immediately. In fact, during the first two decades, the new country saw some remnants of the past, lighting sparks of a revolution that eventually brought down the military rule in 1990. For the first time in its history, Bangladesh had a woman as the Prime Minister and a woman leader of opposition in the parliament. However, the tragedy is that both of them, at one time or another, had used the support of pro-Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami to strengthen their claim to power, just as the military rulers had before them.

Eventually, the current ruling government of Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina, who is the daughter of the first President of Bangladesh, took her alliance with the pro-Islamists to the extreme; she embraced the very principles against which the country became independent in 1971 while under her father’s leadership.

In 2014, she went as far as to declare that she would run the country according to Muhammad’s famous Madinah Charter, under which the non-Muslims would be given certain rights and freedoms, provided they give a special “Zizia” tax to the Muslims and follow the Muslims. https://www.thedailystar.net/country-to-follow-medina-charter-16830

In 2017, the government passed a controversial law allowing marriages of underage girls and boys in ‘special cases,’ ignoring repeated calls of the rights groups.

The ‘Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2017’ put boys below 21 years of age and girls below 18 years in the underage category. Any marriage involving one or both parties below the legal age is considered ‘child marriage,’ reports UNB [United News of Bangladesh]. However, marriages involving underage brides or grooms are not to be considered an offense if they take place with the consent of the court and the guardians in “special contexts” serving the “best interest” of the underage female, the law says.
https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/law-rights/2017/02/27/child-marriage-bill-passed

For example, if the parents can’t afford to feed the underage girl, they can marry the girl off. If an underage girl gets raped, the family will quite often marry her off to the rapist if the rapist offers to take care of the girl. Since this law came into effect, it is not uncommon to see such stories in the newspapers.

Bangladesh has one of the highest child marriage rates in the world – the highest in Asia. Over half (52%) of Bangladeshi girls get married before 18 and almost one-fifth (18%) are married off before 15.

Some people know about the war in 1971 and Birangona women. Could you please share your perspective about that?

During the liberation war of 1971, it is estimated that the Pakistani Army and their local collaborators raped and tortured somewhere between 200,000 to 400,000 women. However, this is the official statistic, and we can be sure that the unofficial number is most likely much higher.

In South Asian societies, quite often, the honor of a family or a man depends on the honor of their women, and as ridiculous as it is, the honor of the women depends on the women being pure or having been untouched or having an intact hymen. That is why, quite often, during warfare the women of the opposite party are attacked and raped as a way to put psychological pressure and undermine the morale of the enemy.

After the Pakistani Army surrendered and Bangladesh declared victory, these raped women were declared as “Birangonas” or “War Heroines.” However, instead of the glory that the title meant to evoke, this title became synonymous with the stigma and hatred that haunted these women for the rest of their existence. Instead of identifying them as Freedom Fighters immediately, the country waited until 2015 to recognize these women as Freedom Fighters. By this time, most of them had died after suffering from decades of financial hardship, social stigma, mental health issues, and lack of basic human necessities such as shelter or self-sufficiency after being abandoned by their families.

Moreover, as a nation, we did nothing to openly discuss their stories of pain, nor resolve the trauma that they went through or that has been handed down to us through generations as a result of that mass sexual violence, one of the largest in the recorded human history. I believe that a lot of current Bangladeshi societies’ twisted notions about sex and the taboo about talking about sexual violence or the reluctance to deal with the issue may have stemmed from this.

I know that sexual violence in South Asia is an epidemic. Why is that?

In South Asian societies, women don’t have any agency over their body, to say anything about their sexuality! And yet, by some twisted logic, the honor of the man who is the legal owner of that woman, whether it’s the father or husband, or the son, as well as the honor of the clan, almost singularly depends on the sexual abstinence of that very woman.

In societies such as Bangladesh, sex education is completely unheard of and the little people know about sex often comes from porn, something that usually men have access to, and therefore, they build their expectations of sex around what they watch in porn. To make things worse, while Islam may denounce everything to do with sex as sinful for this world, the promise of a heaven after death is often filled with the salacious sexual fantasies made even more lurid by the imams, as their voices can be heard from an open microphone in the neighborhood mosques at all hours of day and night.

Incest, double sexual standards, toxic masculinity, sexual violence, marital rape, and childhood sexual abuse is quite common and yet no one talks about these things openly because if a victim ever dares to speak out, her voice is usually stifled in the name of family honor and propriety. As a result, perpetrators continue to get away and become increasingly emboldened.

Part II of this interview will be posted in the February 9 blog.

Shumu Haque is a self-proclaimed feminist, activist, poet, and a voracious reader who started writing from her high-school days. Born in Sri Lanka and brought up in Bangladesh, she has spent more than half of her life in Canada and calls Toronto her home. She works in the Canadian Not-for-Profit Industry. Shumu has studied Humanities and Communications at York University before prior to completing her diploma in Print and Broadcast Journalism from Humber College in Toronto. She is fluent in Bangla, English, Hindi/Urdu, a little bit of Gujarati, and has a special interest in issues pertaining to international human rights and equality. Her experience of growing up as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and fighting to cope with it on her own without any support from those around her made her aware of the necessity to create a support system for other survivors like herself in the South Asian Communities across the globe.

It also made her understand the complexities of the trauma that comes as a result from such abuse and the obstacles that they can create for the survivors unless they receive the necessary support to help them heal and rebuild themselves as strong, independent individuals. It is from this necessity that Shumu got involved in her activism and it is also this desire to see justice done to the survivors of unjust violence that she has been focusing most of her writings around such issues. Shumu has been writing on the portal Women Chapter since 2014 and has been one of the Founding Directors of Women Chapter International. In WCI, she is in charge of the Communications.

Wiola Rebecka, PhD completed psychoanalytic training at the International Psychoanalytic Association London, and later the clinical training program at WTCI. She created and implemented the project "Rape: A History of Shame" and authored the book, Rape A History of Shame--Diary of the Survivors. Her areas of interest and expertise include complex trauma, war-rape survivors’ syndrome, and transgenerational trauma.