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From the valiant sacrifice of Pritilata Waddedar, who swallowed cyanide pills to avoid capture by British forces in 1932, to the spying and frontline battles of Khasi freedom fighter Kakon Bibi in 1971, women were at the forefront of our struggles for freedom against colonization and oppression.
In 2024, as the country rose against years of repression and autocratic rule, it was again the women who paved the way for a new Bangladesh. They were on the battlefield chanting slogans, stopping police vans, breaking blockades, and taking to the streets at night while men could not. The women were the beacon that penetrated the darkness.
Mothers came out with food and supplies tending to injured students defying bullets and tear gas. The student protesters were their children, after all. While men, due to their social position in the hierarchy, were predominantly silent or persecuted, it was the women who spoke up. From domestic workers to grandmothers in mofussils and villages, their words brought down the dictator through daily conversations in both domestic and public spaces. The seeds of freedom were planted through the ordinary speech of our women, who did not shy away from revealing the oppression.
We witnessed initiatives like Mayer Daak, a group of women whose family members had faced enforced disappearances; they became one of the most enduring symbols of defiance and calls for justice during the autocratic rule. They staged demonstrations and faced possibilities of persecution but could not be stopped.
Living up to that ideal, female students during the anti-discrimination movement broke out of their dorms, defying the authorities, and shouted at the security forces, calling them murders "Khuni! Khuni!"
It was Abu Sayeed's mother who asked the question, "Amar betak marlu kene?" a question that reverberated the essence of oppression and triggered resistance in the public imagination. It was the cries of these mothers that truly moved us, making us question the legitimacy of the autocracy that frequently misused women's liberation narratives as an excuse or token to justify its terrorizing policies.
It was the mothers and sisters who cut through those narratives. The students from girls' dormitories, the sisters on the streets fighting back, organizing, planning, and strategizing they were not always in front of the camera and therefore, their struggles and labour are often invisibilized. They worked quietly and fiercely to offer us a new dawn.
