Searching the Dhaka Tribune last week for a piece of my own, I came instead upon an essay I have not been able to put down: Shuchi binte Shahjalal’s The women are divine.
She opens with the old belief of the idol-makers: That a Durga is incomplete unless a little earth from a sex worker’s doorstep is worked into her clay -- for a man leaves his virtue at that threshold, and the ground there turns holy. The goddess cannot be finished without the woman’s soil; the woman herself cannot be let into the festival. The earth is holy, she writes. The person is not.
Let me say at once what I am and am not doing. I am a man, and this is a piece about men. I will not presume to explain to the women of my homeland a cage they have mapped, from the inside, far better than I can.
Shuchi has already said the essential thing, with a scholar’s range and a poet’s aim. I want only to add a footnote -- from the poet we Bengalis reach for whenever we wish to sound reverent about women, and whom, I have come to think, we never actually heard.
The poet we quote but do not hear
We are fond of Tagore as a worshipper of the feminine. We quote him at weddings and drape our daughters’ recitals in his songs. It is worth remembering, then, that at his most attentive, the Bishwakobi was not building the pedestal Shuchi describes. He was warning against it.
I have spent this autumn translating his love songs, one line at a time, and two of them will not now leave me.
The first is Bhalobeshe, sokhi, nibhrite jatone -- “Love me, and in the quiet shrine of your heart, write my name.” Midway, the lover makes a stranger, smaller request:
“Keep, with tender care, my chattering bird, in the courtyard of your palace.”
Read it slowly, and the bird is no ornament. The whole ache of the song is the plea that it be kept, tended, listened to.
In a second song, Tumi ki keboli chhobi -- “Are you only a picture?” -- he almost begs her not to harden into mere paint on a canvas, to be real and present, not an image he can hang on a wall and admire.
A century before our present arguments, Tagore had already named the two ways a man fails a woman: He stops listening to her voice, and he lets her freeze into an image.
Shuchi calls on Nazrul, who dared to address the barangana, the prostitute, as “mother,” and asked who had the right to spit at her.
Let me call on the other giant, who stands, I think, exactly where she does -- on the side of the woman no one will look at or listen to.
The cost of the pedestal
Her essay is unsparing about what reverence costs, in life and in death. She recalls the roughly 1,500 women driven from the Kandapara brothel in Tangail in 2014, long after a High Court had ruled such evictions unconstitutional; the sex workers ridiculed when they report rape, because the society “cannot imagine a sex worker being raped”; and Hamida Begum, who in 2020 became the first sex worker in Daulatdia to receive a proper Islamic burial -- after which the imam who prayed over her said he would not do it again, having been scolded by his neighbours.
Beside these, she sets the national figures she cites: By the counts of the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad and Ain o Salish Kendra, 786 women and girls raped in 2025, up from 516 the year before; and almost 22,000 cases of violence against women and children logged by police in a single year.
I will not borrow her numbers to decorate an argument of my own. I note only what she notices -- that behind each is a woman whom a society that sorts its women into goddesses and fallen women has filed under the second heading.
And I would underline, for every man who thinks himself devout, the sentence of hers that ought to be read aloud from pulpits: A society that calls its women mothers and then cannot bury them, cannot hear them, and makes the raped one hide her face while the rapist walks, has not forgotten reverence -- it has made reverence a way to keep women in their place.
What a doctor knows about honour
Here, let me add the one thing a lifetime in medicine has taught me, because it bears on her point that rape is treated as a stain on a woman’s honour rather than a crime against her body.
I have spent my working life with the human heart -- the actual muscle, four chambers, no holier in a saint than in a so-called fallen woman. A body keeps no ledger of honour. It bleeds the same, grieves the same, heals or fails to heal the same, whatever box the neighbours have assigned its owner.
When we treat a woman’s injury as a stain on her family’s ijjat rather than harm to her person, we are not being moral. We are staring at the honour and refusing to see the woman -- the same failure, once more.
The same soil
So the answer, I think, is not less reverence but reverence that finally opens its eyes. Read generously, the idol-maker’s belief is almost holy: The goddess is made, in part, of the outcast woman’s earth; the divine and the discarded are the same clay.
The tragedy is only that we stop at the clay. We bow to the figure and walk past the person who gave it her soil.
Tagore points where Shuchi points. Keep the chattering bird -- do not cage it, do not silence it, bend down and listen. Do not let her become only a picture on the wall.
The cure for a goddess no one can bear to meet is not to break her into a “fallen” woman; it is to come down off our own certainty and stand beside her at the doorstep -- to see her face, and to hear her voice.
Shuchi binte Shahjalal has written the diagnosis. The least her countrymen -- and I mean the men -- can do is read it with our eyes open for once, and admit what it took a woman on the Op-Ed desk to say plainly.
The idols are immersed. But the women are still at their doorsteps, many still hiding their faces: Divine in theory, and in practice neither seen nor heard.
Rajani K Saha writes from Stockholm, where he practises medicine.