Among Bengali idol-makers, there is an old, informal belief, passed along by word of mouth - that a Durga is incomplete unless a handful of earth from the doorstep of a sex worker is mixed into her clay. The explanation given is that “a man who enters that house leaves his virtue at the door, so the ground there becomes pure.”
Whether or not every workshop still follows it, the idea deserves a slow reading. The goddess cannot be completed without the woman’s soil, and the woman herself cannot be admitted to the festival. The earth is holy; the person is not.
This October 2026, as pandals lit up from Khulna to Old Dhaka, the belief is worth asking about, because it states, in clay, how this society thinks about women.
Psychology has a name for the split. Freud’s 1912 essay, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,described men who can desire only a woman they have debased, and cannot desire the one they respect. It later became known as the “Madonna-whore” complex.
His diagnosis was about men, but the habit of mind is far older than his essay. Women were sorted into two boxes: “Pure” and “the fallen,” with nothing allowed in between.
Literature has always known it. Nathaniel Hawthorne branded Hester Prynne with a scarlet letter; Thomas Hardy subtitled Tess of the d'Urbervilles, “A Pure Woman” and then punished her for being human.
Our own Sarat Chandra gave us the sharpest Bengali version in Devdas. Paro, the respectable, forbidden girl, and Chandramukhi, the courtesan in whose house Devdas drinks himself to ruin.
Nazrul saw it too. In his poem Barangana, he stunned society by addressing a prostitute as “mother,” and asked who had the right to spit at her. He pointed out that the heroes and sages of our own myths had unmarried or “fallen” mothers. More than a century on, we still have not caught up with our national poet.
Bangladesh is among the few Muslim-majority countries where prostitution is legal for adult women who hold a certificate, but the law is ambiguous, leaving sex workers vulnerable to harassment and prosecution.
In July 2014, around 1,500 women were forced out of the 200-year-old Kandapara brothel in Tangail. A High Court judgment in 2000 had called such evictions unconstitutional, but it was never implemented.
Newspaper reports have noted that sex workers are denied food, clothing, shelter, health, and education. When sex workers go to the police after being raped, they are ridiculed. Why? Because people cannot imagine a sex worker being raped. Many mothers send their children away, believing life outside the brothel will be harder because of stigma.
Even death is a denial. Locals refuse to organize funerals for sex workers, neighbours did not bathe her, and a local imam refused to lead her prayers. The only place available for sex workers’ bodies was a cremation ground.
In February 2020, Hamida Begum became the first sex worker in Daulatdia to receive a formal Islamic funeral. Until then, their bodies were often tossed into unmarked graves or the river.
Afterwards, the imam who led the prayers said he would not do it again, because villagers and shopkeepers had criticized him. The Sex Workers Network is still demanding equal burial arrangements.
A woman who must stay pure carries the family’s ijjat, its honour, in her body. And a stain, even one inflicted by someone else, turns the Madonna into the whore.
Look at who is made to hide. According to the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, 786 women and girls were raped or gang-raped in 2025, up from 516 the year before while Ain o Salish Kendra counted 749 cases. Police headquarters recorded 21,939 cases of violence against women and children in 2025.
Between January and May this year, ASK recorded at least 118 children raped and 17 killed. In five recent high-profile cases, the victims were targeted by neighbours, relatives, or acquaintances.
Behind each number is a person who, in a society that has split women into goddesses and whores, now holds the “whore” half. Rape is generally branded as a stain on a woman’s chastity and honour more than as a crime against her body, which shifts the focus from the accused to the victim.
The victim is so heavily stigmatized that perpetrators use the crime itself to silence her. Society collectively ostracizes the victim and her family, which is why most rapes go unreported. Abusers justify the crime by blaming the victim; if she takes the blame, the culprit feels he did nothing wrong.
The same soil
In the soil story, men shed their virtue at a woman’s threshold and the ground holds it. In life, men shed their guilt at a woman’s threshold and she holds it. We bow to the clay goddess and then cannot bear the woman.
A society that calls women its mothers, then cannot bury them, cannot hear them, and makes the raped one hide her face while the rapist is shielded, has not forgotten reverence. It has made reverence a way to keep women in their place.
The idols are immersed. But the women are still at their doorsteps, and many are still hiding their faces. Divine in theory, dirty in practice.
Shuchi Binte Shahjalal is a member of the Editorial and Op-Ed team at the Dhaka Tribune and looks after the Trib Z and Arts & Letters pages.
