Anyone who closely followed the July uprising will recognise a recurring pattern in Bangladesh’s national life. Every time the country feels threatened, whether by foreign influence, political rupture, or the disorienting speed of its own change, attention turns with remarkable swiftness to women. Not first to the failing institutions or the collapsing consensus, but to what women are wearing, where they are going, whom they are seen with, and how loudly they are speaking in public and political life. Within days, a crisis that has nothing obviously to do with women somehow becomes an argument about women’s conduct. This happens often enough and follows a consistent enough pattern that it cannot be treated as a coincidence or as the private prejudice of a few conservative voices. It is a structural feature of Bangladesh’s national life.

In the months after the uprising, this pattern took on unusual force. A group of masked men rode up to the Raju Memorial Sculpture at Dhaka University one night in October 2024 and draped a cloth over the head of the sculpture’s female figure, making her appear veiled and covered. The same impulse took cruder and more violent forms elsewhere. On a launch returning from a picnic near Munshiganj in May 2025, a group of local men accused the female passengers of immoral behaviour and set upon the women aboard; one of them was filmed whipping two female passengers with a belt, and he explained afterwards that he had struck them as a brother stepping in to protect them. At Cox’s Bazar in September 2024, a group led by a man named Mohammad Farokul Islam moved through the area at night, targeting women who were out alone or dressed in ways the men disliked. He forced one to do sit-ups while holding her ears, drove another from her chair, beat others with sticks, and then posted the footage on Facebook as part of a campaign to cleanse the streets of indecency.

The female figure of Dhaka University's Raju Memorial Sculpture, veiled in black cloth by masked men in October 2024.

These are only a few of many such episodes, and much of this vigilantism was justified by those who carried it out and by those who cheered it on. It was presented as a correction to the secularism associated with Hasina’s government, which had just fallen, as though the way to settle accounts with the old order was to reassert control over how women appear and move in public. The impulse did not remain confined to the streets. As the country moved towards the 2026 election, questions about women’s place in society also entered formal political and public debate. The Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Shafiqur Rahman, said that a woman could not lead the party, which fielded no women candidates in the election. Such views, however, were not confined to the conservative religious right. Speaking on the talk show Thikana, Samantha Sharmin of the National Citizen Party (NCP), which emerged from the uprising, said that if her party came to power, it would establish a board to decide what women should wear.

When a nation feels threatened, its anxiety needs somewhere to go, and the ground has already been prepared. Because honour and authenticity are stored in women, moments of perceived danger to the nation produce renewed and often sudden demands for the re-traditionalisation of women, a call for them to return to an imagined proper form.

Colonial genealogy of the inner domain

For Bengal, this arrangement has a specific colonial genealogy that still shapes the present. Partha Chatterjee has shown that anticolonial nationalism in the subcontinent handled the question of women by dividing the social world into two. There was an outer, material domain of statecraft, economy, and science, where colonial superiority was conceded and Western methods were adopted. And there was an inner, spiritual domain of the home, the ghar, where the nation declared itself already sovereign and refused the coloniser any entry. Women were made the bearers of that inner domain. The respectable woman, the bhadramahila, was fashioned to be educated and companionate, yet emphatically not Westernised, distinct from the memsahib above her and the labouring woman below. Tanika Sarkar has taken the point further, showing that the household, and the body of the Hindu woman in particular, came to be understood as the last independent space left to a colonised people. It was the one place where an authentic and still-sovereign national self could be said to survive. The consequence of this history is that national honour and authenticity were deposited in women’s bodies long before any particular crisis arrived to activate them. The burden was already there. The body of the woman was already carrying the weight of the nation’s integrity.

Therefore, when a nation feels threatened, its anxiety needs somewhere to go, and the ground has already been prepared. Because honour and authenticity are stored in women, moments of perceived danger to the nation produce renewed and often sudden demands for the re-traditionalisation of women, a call for them to return to an imagined proper form. Fears about foreign domination, cultural dilution, or loss of control are displaced onto women’s dress, women’s mobility, and women’s sexuality. These become the visible signs of a national integrity that, in a moment of crisis, feels as though it is slipping away. The logic is coherent even when it is cruel. If the woman’s body is the concrete emblem of the nation’s wholeness, then securing that body feels like securing the nation. Policing the veil or the sari, restricting a daughter’s movement, and scrutinising a woman’s presence in the street or the political square all operate as ways of managing a fear that, at bottom, has very little to do with women themselves.

During the Liberation War of 1971, the Pakistani military raped hundreds of thousands of Bengali women as a systematic weapon, treating the impregnation of these women as a means of remaking the population. Women’s bodies were made the literal ground on which national domination was to be written.

The anthropology of the body helps explain why the scrutiny is so relentlessly physical, so fixed on what is worn and what is shown. The surface of the body is where a society writes itself, and Mary Douglas observed that concern with the body’s margins intensifies wherever the boundaries of the group are felt to be under threat. A nation worried about its edges will grow worried about the edges of women’s bodies, about the hem, the sleeve, and the covered or uncovered head, because it is on that surface that the nation is being read. The same reasoning explains why this same body becomes a site of violence in extreme circumstances.

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Caption

Female students taking to the streets and raising their voices during the July mass uprising in Dhaka in 2024.

Bangladesh knows this in the most severe form imaginable. During the Liberation War of 1971, the Pakistani military raped hundreds of thousands of Bengali women as a systematic weapon, treating the impregnation of these women as a means of remaking the population. Women’s bodies were made the literal ground on which national domination was to be written. And the aftermath followed the same logic in a quieter register. Women entered the national story principally through the violence done to them, remembered as birangona rather than as combatants, couriers, and organisers. The rehabilitation programmes that followed worked to restore the honour of the national family more than the standing of the women who had survived. The arrangement that makes women the peacetime boundary of the nation is the same one that makes them its wartime target. The body that is made to carry the nation’s honour is, by that very fact, the body through which the nation can be claimed, defiled, or wounded.

Therefore, the projection of national anxiety onto women is neither irrational nor accidental. It follows directly from the structure by which women were made to carry national meaning in the first place. The nation requires a body in order to feel real and bounded; women were assigned that role. When the nation is afraid, its fear takes the form of surveillance over women. The panic was never really about the length of a garment or the company a young woman keeps. These are simply the visible signs onto which a far larger fear about the coherence and continuity of the nation is transferred, and they are legible precisely because women were made to signify the nation to begin with.

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The nation requires a body in order to feel real and bounded; women are often assigned that role.

The cost women carry

What this arrangement costs women is worth stating, because it is the reason the pattern deserves scrutiny. Women are granted an extraordinary symbolic centrality, elevated as the essence and repository of the nation. They pay for that elevation with the loss of their agency. To be the enduring emblem of the nation is, at the same time, to be removed from its history as an actor, honoured as a symbol while denied recognition as a person. The distance between being the image of the nation and being a full member of it is where the contradiction lies. Recognising the mechanism is what allows us to stop reading these recurring panics as though they were genuinely about women and to begin seeing them for what they are: the displacement of a nation’s fears about itself onto the bodies it has always asked to bear them. That recognition is the necessary condition for refusing to let women’s bodies go on absorbing anxieties that were never theirs to hold.

Nabila Tasneem Anonnya is a fellow, teaching associate, and PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Arizona State University.

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