Talk to any women in Dhaka, the bustling capital of twenty-two million people, and they will tell you a story about the orna. A common one is how it is the first thing a woman will grab if she has to run out of her house for any reason—whether an earthquake, a fire, or even a medical emergency. Another is how the orna either gets tangled, or has the potential to, in the spiky wheels of a three-wheeler rickshaw as random passersby cry out, “ai, orna shamla”. In significant ways, however, women and girls here embrace, modify, claim, or reject, as well as wear this garment. Over the last decade, significant scholarly debate has proceeded over veiling’s relationship to Bangladeshi nationalism, Muslim female subjectivity, and national identity formation, but a definitive investigation into the various meanings attached to the orna has not yet emerged. While both contemporary South Asian and mainstream Western feminist scholarship have long since recognized that women’s clothes, especially those that uphold theocentric gender and social norms place an uneasy burden on them, the orna’s status as a garment that covers a woman’s head, torso, or simply her chest has not received as much attention as it warrants.

The orna, its usage, and its meanings have shifted considerably over the last decades. In the 1970s and 1980s (and partially in the 1990s), the orna signified the arrival of female adolescence. Young women switched from frocks and migrated into adulthood by wearing the shalwar kameez with the orna. Young girls were drawn to the garment as it symbolized the arrival of womanhood, even while it was simultaneously imposed on them. In other words, it signified the line separating childhood from adolescence. Today, the orna is worn in a multitudinous way, and its meaning is varied, contentious, and at times ambiguous. For some for instance, the orna is an in-between garment of choice—urban women sometimes carry it, feeling that, since they do not wear the veil, the orna might afford them some security and safety. The most traditional version of the orna however, is an accompaniment of the shalwar kameez where the loose scarf is worn across the chest area or covers both the head and chest. Significantly, women, especially elderly women, also use the end of the saree to cover their head. Using the end of the saree to cover the hair is known as the ghomta or ghunghat in many parts of South Asia. In Bangladesh, the gesture to cover one’s head is known as mathay kapor, or having a cloth over one’s head. Mathay/mathar kapor has its own usages and its signifiers are different from the traditional signifiers of the hijab, the latter of which follows a more rigidly constructed value system steeped within Islam. The layers here are unmistakably complex; orna, saree, and hijab all cover the head—completely or partially—and these sartorial choices and practices vary depending on women’s class positions, their mobility requirements, and their social and familial obligations, among other key factors. Depending on where an individual is going—work, school, market, dropping children off at school, visiting in-laws or more conservative relatives, joining an intimate gathering of friends, these clothing practices assume a fluid, malleable nature. The orna and its usage is part of a layered, complex sociocultural ecosystem where diverging perspectives on taste, practicality, surveillance, and modesty converge.

Orna vs. saree: The many shifts within Bangladeshi Nationalism

Before we can profitably delve further into a discourse on the orna, we must place the garment in a contextually specific manner with regard to Bangladesh’s own history. Although Bangladesh was founded with secular principles in 1971, it has increasingly been turning toward its Muslim identity over the last twenty years, thanks partly to the continuous expansion and institutionalization of religious-based madrasa education, among other globalized trends.  The debates over Bengali Muslim identity versus Muslim Bengali identity, as well as Bengali, Bangladeshi versus indigenous Bangladeshi, have persisted since before Bangladesh’s inception and continue to change, shape, and form the Bangladeshi identity into the third decade of the twenty-first century, especially as Bangladesh advances economically. The first term, Bengali Muslim, refers to the pre-independence and pre-Partition era privileging of educated Bengali Hindu identity over the minoritized Bengali Muslim identity. Such privileging persisted during the Pakistan era, with the Urdu-speaking Muslim majority in the West further minoritizing and discriminating against the Bengali Muslims in the East in practically every sphere of life. Bangladesh’s struggle for independence was sparked by a Bengali nationalist sentiment, a desire for a land for Bengalis. This time however, Bengali identity was combined with an assumption of Muslimness and erased the indigenous population of the land—who are neither Muslim nor Bengali—from the construction of Bangladeshi nationalism.

The orna conversation is inexorably linked with the shifting histories of Bangladeshi nationalism and Bangladeshi femininity and the significant role women’s sartorial preferences have played in the construction of the Bangladeshi female citizen subject. It is my contention that the orna versus the end of the saree debate mimetically revisits the dualism inherent in the story of Bangladesh’s nation formation where the saree—a qualifier for Bengali femininity—stood in opposition to the founding values and principles of Pakistan via its Muslim counterpart, the shalwar kameez. Independent Bangladesh has largely embraced the shalwar kameez. Yet, in a circuitous way, the continuing saree-versus-shalwar kameez debate keeps those same foundational principles contentious, making it a subject worth delving into.

This embracement of the shalwar kameez and orna speaks to a shift in Bengali ethno-nationalism on one hand, and the orna’s placement as a significant marker of female modesty initiates inquiries about secular nationalism, on the other. It can thus be argued that the orna is just as much part of a secular modern aesthetic as the saree once was and in fact, still is.

Dina Siddiqi offers that “the once pressing question of whether Bangladeshi identity is at core Bengali or Muslim seems no longer relevant for much of the population. If at an earlier moment the question was whether Islam has a place in the nation, today it is not whether but which form of Islam is most appropriate (Dina M. Siddiqi, “Muslim Bodies, Imperial Politics and Feminist Frames,” 67).

While Siddiqi’s claim that Muslimness is the fundamental ideological and identitarian position held by Bangladeshis in the present moment has merit, this inherent tension between Muslim and Bengali culture—consecrated by non-Islamic and indeed Hindu practices in forming the Muslim Bengali identity—has not completely been effaced from the public and political imagination. Indeed, as this article establishes, women’s attire and the disciplinary tactics surrounding it reveal newer methods of engaging with those debates as well as disclose alternate ways of imagining Bangladeshi female subjectivity.

With the majority of adult women in post-Independence Bangladesh now wearing the shalwar kameez, pre-Independence dupatta’s lexiconic usage (dupatta is the Hindi/Urdu version of the garment) has shifted to the orna (the Bengali word) and with it, a change in Bangladesh’s secular modern aesthetic has become noticeable. This embracement of the shalwar kameez and orna speaks to a shift in Bengali ethno-nationalism on one hand, and the orna’s placement as a significant marker of female modesty initiates inquiries about secular nationalism, on the other. It can thus be argued that the orna is just as much part of a secular modern aesthetic as the saree once was and in fact, still is. Put simply, if the saree was once the secular modern garment of choice, post-independence Bangladesh’s choice is the shalwar kameez with the orna.

Which brings us to the next crucial question: has the orna’s secularity been concealed by the more powerful discursive practices of the hijab in recent times? For me, however, dismissing the sartorial and ideological shifts from saree to shalwar kameez to hijab as a neat, linear story of progression where Bengali identitarian politics first rejected an Urdu-speaking identity politics and embraced a more Wahhabized politics oversimplifies the narrative of women’s perceptions of self as well as Bangladesh’s interest in marking its women’s bodies as sites for nationalist ideology.

The logic of the secular

One important way in which the orna can be thought of as secular is by thinking of it as a garment that transcends religious boundaries but cannot be used as a shorthand to determine one’s religion or religiosity. Bangladesh’s history with secularism is rather convoluted. In recent times, both organized feminist protest movements as well as everyday negotiations women make with their sartorial preferences attest to the struggles with secularism versus Islam. While it is true that the female body in the public space—clad in shalwar kameez and orna—has come to signify the new Bangladeshi Muslim woman, the public space is also witnessing an overwhelming number of women wearing the hijab and its many iterations, including the full abaya or burqa, the hijab over Western wear, the orna as a hijab, and the full niqab.

That more Bangladeshi women now wear the hijab cannot simply be blamed on “external pressure by way of money from the Gulf states or ‘Saudization,’ where the fear of conservatism making way for radicalization” (Samia Huq, “Seeking Certainty,” in Contemporary South Asia, 257). Contrarily, Siddiqi offers that such visible veiling “directly comes up against the nationalist ideology on which Bangladesh was founded, as a secular sovereign state in explicit opposition to the Muslim nationalism of Pakistan. Here veiling signals the potential loss of a hard-earned secular state” (Dina M. Siddiqi, “Muslim Bodies,” in Women, Veiling and Politics, 68). Nonetheless Huq insists that despite the recent drive to Wahhabization, which has led to greater efforts to physically and socially separate women from men who are not kin, before “bemoaning the loss of secular modern accoutrements in the lives of young women today,” we must consider the shift in class mobility that has taken place since Independence. More women now participate in public life (including going to university or working in the RMG sector) who come from “non-elite families and do not have the educational attainment and social capital of those that did so 50 years ago.” For Huq the conservative shift at least with regard to sartorial choices can be viewed as a “victory for class mobility” (Samia Huq, “Seeking Certainty,” in Contemporary South Asia, 258).

One important way in which the orna can be thought of as secular is by thinking of it as a garment that transcends religious boundaries but cannot be used as a shorthand to determine one’s religion or religiosity. Bangladesh’s history with secularism is rather convoluted. In recent times, both organized feminist protest movements as well as everyday negotiations women make with their sartorial preferences attest to the struggles with secularism versus Islam.

Siddiqi disagrees and offers that “for working-class women who face tremendous social stigma within the public sphere, purdah is intimately bound up with ‘secular’ notions of sexual respectability” (Siddiqi, “Muslim Bodies,” 71). While Huq is keen to grant working-class women a degree of agency in their decision of veil/maintain purdah, Siddiqi too, is right to point to the secular modern unease that is produced by such “compulsory” veiling.

This debate touches on several interlocking factors—a desire to dismiss a secular modern aesthetic as aspirational, marking that aesthetic as middle to upper class and therefore out of reach and unobtainable to a vast section of the population, and defending a turn toward performative Islam. Siddiqi ends her essay by calling to broaden the debate on the veil, and to that, I add that that debate must include the orna. Just as an assumption that the hijab equals rampant Islamization cannot be made, so cannot it be argued that the orna is purely secular. For one thing, such binarization is not so easily discernible in Bangladesh’s religio-political landscape where women’s clothes occupy a significant, crucial place. For another, the orna’s performative role in the construction of female identity cannot be overlooked. Despite Huq and Siddiqi’s exclusion of the orna in their analysis, the comparative cultural politics of the hijab and orna—notwithstanding the unevenness in their functionality as cultural referents—cannot be overlooked as both garments represent Bangladeshi femininity and the feminist politics of modesty, respectability, modernity, piety, and seclusion. The garment functions as a technology of class mobility and as a form of protection or shield against sexual harassment in public space. Class and mobility are crucial elements in this discourse as exclusionary and seclusive spaces often tend to permit greater freedom regarding clothing choices. In places where women can avert the heteropatriarchal, disciplinary, and indeed religious gaze, they more explicitly subvert the norms of modesty by wearing the orna in a more flexible manner or even abandon the garment altogether. Yet, women from more economically affluent backgrounds still need to pay heed to normative orna conventions. Put simply, the many polarizing, conflicting, and complex cultural meanings the orna has borne since before Bangladesh’s inception must be read alongside the similarly contested site of the hijab.

Dr. Nazia Manzoor is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at North South University. She is also Editor of Star Books and Literature.

This excerpt is taken from an article originally titled “The Orna’s Secular Aesthetics and the Cultural Politics of Selfhood in Contemporary Bangladesh,” published in Feminist Studies, Volume 51, Numbers 1 & 2 (2026), pages 85-111. Reprinted by permission of Feminist Studies, Inc.

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