Begum Sufia Kamal: Poet and Pioneer of the Women's Movement in Bangladesh

Begum Sufia Kamal (1911–1999) was a poet who was never sent to school. Raised in purdah in a landowning Barisal family, she taught herself literature at home, published her first story at twelve, and went on to become the most durable public figure of the women's movement in Bangladesh: a writer of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, the first editor of the women's weekly Begum, the founding president of Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, and a woman whose Dhaka home stayed open to freedom fighters through the nine months of the Liberation War. For the last three decades of the twentieth century she was, in effect, the conscience of the nation — the person governments, movements and ordinary citizens looked to when a public question had a moral edge. Bangladeshis knew her simply as Khalamma, the Aunt.

A Girlhood Behind the Purdah

Sufia Kamal was born on 20 June 1911 at Shayestabad in Barisal, at Rahat Manzil, her maternal family's home. She was the daughter of Syed Abdul Bari, a lawyer, and Sabera Banu, and she grew up in the world the aristocratic Muslim families of the time built for their daughters: a house divided between the public rooms where men received the world and the inner quarters where women and girls lived out of sight. She was raised chiefly by her mother, in a household of tutors, servants and strict seclusion.

School was never considered for her. Like the daughters of such families, she was educated at home, and the education on offer was carefully fenced: house tutors taught her Urdu, Arabic and Persian, the languages of faith and respectability. Bengali, the language she actually spoke, was not on the formal list. She learned it the way she would learn most things — informally and by determination — from her mother and from her maternal uncle, Syed Mohammad Hossain. The girl who was denied a classroom became, in time, a writer in the very language her schooling had treated as an afterthought.

The decisive encounter of her childhood came in 1918, when she travelled to Calcutta with her mother and met Begum Rokeya, the writer and school-founder who had made Muslim women's education her life's argument. Sufia was seven. The meeting was brief, but by her own later account the inspiration of it shaped the whole course of her life; when she settled in Calcutta as a young wife a decade later, she went to work alongside Rokeya, and she spent the rest of her life, in a sense, completing Rokeya's unfinished agenda.

At twelve — some accounts say eleven — she was married to her maternal cousin Syed Nehal Hossain, a law student. Child marriage was the norm of her world, but Nehal Hossain was not a typical husband of it. Liberal in outlook, he encouraged both her writing and her first steps into welfare work among poor women, work she carried out travelling in a burqah. In 1925 she met Mahatma Gandhi at Barisal, an encounter that left its mark in small, deliberate ways: she gave up the elaborate dress of her childhood for simple handloom saris and joined Matri Mangal, an organisation for women's welfare. The pattern of her life — literature and organised compassion, pursued together — was set before she was fifteen.

The Poet Emerges: Sanjher Maya

Her writing began early and in public. In 1923 her first short story, "Sainik Badhu" (The Soldier Bride), appeared in the journal Tarun. After the young couple moved to Calcutta, where Nehal Hossain was studying law, the marriage opened a second door: the city's literary world. Among the figures the couple met was Kazi Nazrul Islam, who read Sufia's poems, was struck by them, and urged her to print them. In 1926 the editor Mohammad Nasiruddin published her first poem, "Basanti" (Of Spring), in his journal Saogat. In 1929 she joined the Anjuman-i-Khawatin-i-Islam, the association of Muslim women Rokeya had founded, and in 1931 she was elected to the Indian Women's Federation — the first Muslim woman to be elected to it.

Then, in 1932, the two pillars of her young life fell in the same year. Rokeya died suddenly in December. Nehal Hossain died of tuberculosis, leaving Sufia a widow at twenty-one with a small daughter, Amena. The expected script for a young widow of her class was withdrawal: a return to her in-laws' house in Barisal and a life of pious invisibility. She refused it. She stayed in Calcutta with her daughter, her brother and her widowed mother, took a teaching post at the Calcutta Corporation Free Primary School for girls — she worked there from 1933 to 1941 — and kept writing. Her first collection of short stories, Keyar Kanta (Thorns of the Keya Tree), appeared in 1937.

In 1938 came the book that made her name. Sanjher Maya (The Eventide Spell), her first volume of poems, was published from Calcutta carrying a foreword by Nazrul, who praised the young poet as "a new star on the horizon of Bangla poetry". Rabindranath Tagore read the book and wrote to her that she had "a high place in Bangla literature, as constant and fixed as the Pole Star". For a woman who had never attended school to be blessed, in print, by the two presiding figures of Bengali letters was an extraordinary public arrival.

In 1939 she married again — Kamaluddin Ahmad Khan, a writer and translator of the Bulbul literary circle, from whom she took the name by which history knows her: Sufia Kamal. The marriage gave her four more children and, as important, a household that treated her public work as a shared enterprise. It was the platform from which the poet became an institution-builder.

From Poetry to Public Life

The 1940s turned her welfare work into something larger. When communal rioting tore Calcutta apart in 1946, she helped set up a shelter for riot victims at Lady Brabourne College. In 1947 Mohammad Nasiruddin founded Begum, a weekly magazine for women that would run for decades, and made Sufia Kamal its first editor. That October, with Partition, the family moved to Dhaka — and a new phase of her life began at once.

In 1948 she joined the Shanti Committee, formed to defend Hindu–Muslim friendship in a city filling with refugees and rumour, and she became president of the new Purba Pakistan Mahila Samiti, the East Pakistan women's council. In 1949 she co-founded and co-edited, with Jahanara Arzoo, a weekly named Sultana — after the heroine of Begum Rokeya's Sultana's Dream, a deliberate act of literary homage. In 1952 she took part in the Language Movement; after police killed protesters on 21 February, she was among the women who organised in protest and pressed the demand that Bengali be recognised as a state language. In 1956 she founded Kachi-Kanchar Mela, a national organisation for children that generations of Bangladeshi children would grow up in.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, as the Pakistani state pressed harder on Bengali language and culture, her organising took on a cultural front. She protested the official suppression of Bengali culture, above all the ban on Tagore, and in 1961, the centenary year of Tagore's birth, she led the Sanskritik Swadhikar Andolon, the Movement for Cultural Autonomy. The state had earlier given her one of its own honours, the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, in 1961; in 1969, as the mass uprising against military rule gathered force, she returned it in protest at the government's oppressive treatment of Bengalis. Honours, for Sufia Kamal, were never a reason to stay silent.

The Mahila Parishad and 1971

Her most consequential act of organisation came at the end of that decade. In 1969 a Mahila Sangram Parishad — a Women's Struggle Council — was formed with her as founding chairperson, and on 4 April 1970 it was formally established as the Mahila Parishad (then of East Pakistan; after liberation, Bangladesh Mahila Parishad), with Sufia Kamal as its founding president and Maleka Begum as general secretary. It grew into the largest women's organisation in the country, and she remained its president for the rest of her life — some three decades of campaigns for women's legal rights, political representation, education and protection from violence, built on her conviction, stated long before it became a global slogan, that women's rights are human rights.

Within a year of its founding, the Parishad's president faced the defining test of her generation. In March 1971 she led a women's rally in the non-cooperation movement. When the Pakistani military crackdown began on 25 March, she made a decision that defined her war: she stayed. Two of her daughters joined the Mukti Bahini and helped set up the first hospital for freedom fighters at Agartala. Sufia Kamal, her husband and her elder son remained at their Dhanmondi home in occupied Dhaka, which became a point of moral support and a safe place where messages could be passed to the resistance. By the accounts published in The Daily Star, she refused — despite threats to her life — to sign a statement endorsing the military's version of events, that no massacre had taken place. Her son Shoeb went missing in 1971 and was never found.

Through those nine months she wrote. She kept two diaries: a prose record published in 1989 as Ekatturer Diary (Diary of '71), one of the essential eyewitness accounts of occupied Dhaka, with its curfews, raids, shortages and whispered exchanges of news; and a poetic diary published after liberation as Mor Jaduder Samadhi Pare (Where My Darlings Lie Buried). Her wartime poem "Benibinyas Samay To Ar Nei" — No More Time for Braiding Your Hair — told the women of Bengal that adornment could wait and duty could not. When liberation came in December 1971, it was fitting that she was chosen to inaugurate the first television programme of independent Bangladesh.

Conscience of the Nation: The Later Years

Independence made her not a retired heroine but a working one. She was a founding chairperson of the Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation Board, of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee — the body that grew into BRAC — and of organisations for the rehabilitation of the destitute; she served as president of cultural and welfare bodies including Chhayanaut and the Bangladesh Protibondhi Foundation, which works for people with disabilities. The Mahila Parishad remained her central platform, and through it she led delegations and campaigns on the questions that outlasted the war: reserved seats and direct election for women, discriminatory laws, dowry, and violence against women.

Age did not retire her conscience. In 1992, in her eighties, she stood among the leaders of the Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee, the citizens' platform formed under Jahanara Imam to demand the trial of those who had collaborated in the atrocities of 1971, and she chaired the movement's People's Inquiry Commission, whose investigators documented war crimes across the country and published their reports in 1994 and 1995. To the end of her life she stood publicly for a secular, democratic Bangladesh and against communal politics — positions she had held, without much interruption, since the 1940s.

The honours accumulated to nearly fifty major awards. The Bangla Academy gave her its literary award in 1962; independent Bangladesh gave her the Ekushey Padak in 1976 and its highest civilian honour, the Independence Day Award, in 1997; in 1996 she received the Begum Rokeya Padak, the national award named for her own mentor — a closing of the circle that had opened when a seven-year-old girl was taken to meet Rokeya in Calcutta in 1918.

Legacy

Sufia Kamal died in Dhaka on 20 November 1999, aged eighty-eight. Bangladesh buried her with full state honours at Azimpur graveyard — the first woman in the country's history to receive a state funeral. Dhaka's central public library now bears her name, the Sufia Kamal National Public Library, and the Mahila Parishad she founded works from Sufia Kamal Bhaban, a headquarters named for its founding president.

Her written legacy is larger than any single book, though Sanjher Maya remains the foundation of it: more than a dozen volumes of poetry, collections of stories beginning with Keyar Kanta, travel writing, and the autobiographical Ekale Amader Kal (In This Time, Our Time, 1988), in which the girlhood behind the purdah and her years with Rokeya are preserved in her own words. Her poems travelled — translated into English, Russian, Chinese, German, Italian, Polish, Vietnamese, Hindi and Urdu, with Sanjher Maya itself published in Russian translation in the Soviet Union in 1984. Her 1970 collection Mrttikar Ghran (Fragrance of the Earth) she dedicated to Rokeya; and through the memorial committee she helped form, it was her generation that proposed naming Dhaka University's first women's hall Rokeya Hall, fixing her mentor's name over the doorway of the university's women students.

Conclusion

Sufia Kamal's life is the bridge between two eras of Bengali women's history. On one side stands Rokeya, arguing in essays and fiction that women must be educated; on the other, a Bangladesh in which women's organisations count their members in the hundreds of thousands. Sufia Kamal was the person who carried the argument from the first side to the second — not only by writing poems that Tagore and Nazrul praised, but by building the institutions, editing the magazines, sheltering the riot victims and, when her country was occupied, staying at her post and writing down what she saw. She liked to say that she would keep removing the thorns from the path so that those who came after would not prick their feet. It is as good a summary as any of what she did.