A common charge feminists in many post-colonial nations face is that their activism is “imported” from the West. When they challenge harmful practices within their own societies or advocate social change, fundamentalist groups reject their interventions and label them “Westernised”. Feminism in these regions is dismissed as a product of a colonised consciousness, on the grounds that critiquing “our culture” or seeking to change it is understood as colonial reasoning. Behind this rhetoric lies a rigid us-versus-them worldview, in which “our culture” is imagined as pure, authentic, and under threat, while “their culture” is cast as an invading force. This binary leaves little room for feminists to contest oppressive cultural practices within their own societies. Feminists in Bangladesh have long faced similar accusations. In the post-uprising period in particular, conservative right-wing groups have repeatedly labelled feminist activism a “Western” act and demanded its complete boycott.

At first glance, this rhetoric may appear as an effort to defend “our culture” against “Western culture”, a stance that can seem natural, even positive, given our history of Western colonial domination. However, historical scholarship suggests that the construction of the indigenous versus Western culture binary is itself a colonialist approach to the cultures of colonised regions. Upholding and policing this binary does not resist colonial logic; it merely replicates and reinforces it.

Feminist scholar Uma Narayan (1997) demonstrates that the roots of this divide can be traced through the history of anti-colonial nationalism. Nationalist movements in many colonised regions sought to define themselves by drawing a sharp contrast with the West and by rejecting Western values outright. To do so, an emphasis on an “uncorrupted”, “authentic” indigenous culture emerged as a response to colonial attempts to regulate, abolish, or look down upon local practices.

Nonetheless, the irony remains that the colonisers first insisted on the cultural divide, which they justified through claims of a superior “Western civilisation”. Anti-colonial nationalists later reversed the hierarchy of cultural superiority but retained the same rigid distinction, because both sides had political reasons to stress the “otherness” of the opposing culture. Both colonial and anti-colonial discourses presented their cultures as pre-existing, independent entities, vulnerable to external influence and therefore in need of protection, even though each culture was produced only through comparison and contrast with the other. For example, Uma Chakravarti (1990) shows that many of the traditions of the Indian subcontinent were produced as a contrast to colonial and Western narratives by both colonial and nationalist discourses; they did not exist independently before these constructions. Similarly, many of the “oldest English traditions” were invented only in the late nineteenth century (Narayan 1997).

Colonial powers presented themselves as defenders of liberty, progress, and equality to justify their dominance and demanded that colonised peoples accept the “changes” imposed upon them to overcome their “backwardness”, even as these powers themselves denied women political and civil rights in the West, upheld slavery, and exercised colonial domination. Nationalist leaders in the colonies, in turn, portrayed their own cultures as morally superior and rejected social change, claiming that only indigenous culture held value, while disregarding the ways in which their culture and traditions oppressed many people, particularly women and marginalised groups, through practices such as dowry killing, child marriage, sati, honour killings, and other forms of violence. In this essay, I will discuss how the framework of this binary of “our culture” and “their culture” was constructed, maintained, and embedded in the regulation of women’s roles throughout history.

Colonial hierarchies justified through patriarchal concepts
Western colonial powers justified their claims to superiority over colonised peoples through patriarchal logic that had long structured European family and political life. For example, European political thought had long equated the absolutist natural authority of the father in the family with authority in society. As Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman (1998) note, English patriarchal theorists such as Sir Robert Filmer argued that fathers held absolute authority over their families, and that kings similarly held absolute power over their kingdoms. French absolutist theorists likewise likened kingdoms to families and kings to fathers (Merrick 1993). These patriarchal frameworks provided a model through which colonial powers could justify ruling over colonised peoples—just as fathers ruled over dependants in the family, Europeans could rule over the supposedly “immature” and “dependent” populations under their control.

Colonial authorities routinely infantilised colonised populations, portraying men in colonised regions as incapable of rational thought and self-discipline, and women as victims of backward local practices, in need of European guidance (Miller 1998). British theorists such as James Mill framed colonial rule in India as Britain’s duty to guide a “young” and “immature” society towards maturity, a formulation that echoed the paternal logic of the household (Nandy 1987). French colonial discourse similarly constructed Arab men as simultaneously emasculated and excessively domineering over women, and legitimated European intervention as necessary tutelage (Orlando 2001).

In this respect, it is helpful to reference Vrushali Patil’s (2013) discussion of the General Assembly debates which, over the fifteen years following the UN’s founding, shaped the passage of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Male diplomats from Euro-American colonial states debated with representatives from newly independent Asian and African states. As Patil (2008) notes, Euro-American diplomats argued that dependent populations were “irrational”, “effeminate”, “childlike”, and in need of “tutelage” for their progress and eventual self-government. Belgian and Canadian delegates described them as “wards of the international community” (Patil 2008). British speakers compared colonial rule to “a parent guiding children towards adulthood” and expressed pride in overseeing their development (Patil 2008).

With the rise of liberal political thought in Europe, a shift from absolutist European patriarchy to a paternalist form was noticeable, one that emphasised guidance over absolute authority. Colonial discourse mirrored this transformation: colonised peoples were eventually framed as subjects to be civilised and tutored. This change softened the language of rule while retaining the same gendered and racialised structures of authority.

Anti-colonial challenge in masculine terms
Although anti-colonial speakers opposed colonial rule, they did so through a deeply gendered language that positioned political domination and liberation in masculine terms. In these discussions, colonial rule was described as a moral violation, including “moral prostitution” and “rape”, and as a system that emasculated colonised men: “Colonialism is a system that takes the manhood out of those exposed to it”, leaving the “colonised man, in whom all dignity has been blunted,” morally diminished (Patil 2013).

Decolonisation, on the other hand, was framed by anti-colonial men as a restoration of masculinity and adult political subjectivity. Freedom was described as returning to be “master” in one’s “own house”, and independence as the moment when “nearly a thousand million men have recovered their outraged dignity and freedom” (Patil 2013). Colonial paternalism, being unnatural and feminising, was to be replaced with masculinist relations grounded in “human brotherhood”, equality, and cooperation among “free and equal peoples and men” (Patil 2013). To explain further, as colonial paternalism denied political subjectivity to “infantilised” and “feminised” dependent men, anti-colonial men attempted to reclaim that subjectivity by reclaiming adulthood and masculine sovereignty.

Women were largely absent from this vision of anti-colonial national freedom. Femininity was framed as a sign of weakness, and women were positioned as a population to be led and guided—from a familial framework to a national framework—by men. In this way, colonial paternalism was displaced by a nationalist patriarchal framework. Within this new framework, anti-colonial struggles were cast in terms of adult masculinity, portraying men as “brothers” and “warriors” fighting for freedom (Patil 2013), rather than as a broader critique of the racialised and gendered hierarchies that underpinned colonial rule. Anti-colonial reactions and resistance were therefore constrained from the outset, as they did not fundamentally challenge the colonial hierarchies of gender and race. At the same time, in articulating national freedom as the emancipation of “us” from “them”—a framework that required the active imagination and consolidation of an oppositional “other”—anti-colonial nationalists relied on the same oppositional framework imposed by Western colonialism, a colonial inheritance whose legacies must be addressed critically.

Gender politics and the symbolisation of women in the nationalist framework
While the anti-colonial nationalist vision was articulated in masculine terms, the emerging new nations nonetheless required symbolic representation to make their cultural and moral authority visible, and women were made central to this process. Nationalist discourse drew on an already existing patriarchal construction in which women were seen as symbols of virtue, reproducers of culture, and bearers of honour, and redeployed these ideas at the level of the nation, with women positioned as its cultural core and men as its political protectors.

Women entered the national public not as equal citizens but as what Mrinalini Sinha (2000) calls members of the “national family”. Their primary nationalist functions lay in biological, social, and cultural reproduction: as mothers of future citizens, as transmitters of language and tradition, and as symbols of national virtue. This symbolism carried important consequences. Because women came to embody national honour and cultural authenticity, they also became sites of intense regulation. Nationalist anxieties about “Westernisation”, the loss of indigenous cultural “authenticity”, and the decline of indigenous morals were repeatedly displaced onto women’s bodies and conduct. As Sinha (2000) notes, moments of perceived national crisis often intensified this process and produced renewed calls for the “retraditionalisation” of women. The protection of women thus became synonymous with the preservation of national culture; the rhetoric of protecting women simultaneously served as a rhetoric of protecting the nation, which was constantly feminised and imagined as vulnerable to violation by “Western” forces.

Another consequence of symbolising women as bearers of national cultural honour is that, while this is framed as resistance to Western cultural invasion, it does not entail a complete rejection of Western influence within the nationalist framework. As Partha Chatterjee (1993) notes, what occurs is a “selective” appropriation. Western practices are accommodated in domains mainly associated with men, while women are disproportionately tasked with preserving the “spiritual distinctiveness” of native culture. What this selective appropriation produces is a situation in which men’s engagement with Western forms is normalised, whereas women bear a disproportionate responsibility for preserving national culture. For example, native men’s adoption of Western clothing, such as shirts, is rarely contested, whereas native women wearing Western-style tops generates nationalist anxiety.

Sinha (2000) situates the nationalist logic of protecting women within what she terms the politics of “colonial masculinity”. Under colonial rule, British imperial masculinity was constructed by feminising native men as weak, while colonial men justified their authority through the trope of protecting native women from native men. Simultaneously, as Amirah Inglis (1975) notes, the image of a “vulnerable white womanhood” that embodied the honour and prestige of the white race was frequently invoked to legitimise colonial authority over native men. The protection of women, both white and native, thus functioned as a central colonial tactic to legitimise colonial interventions.

What was unfortunate was that anti-colonial nationalist frameworks emerged within the same gendered terrain. As colonised men sought to reclaim their masculinity in response to colonial emasculation, they did so by asserting their capacity to protect, control, and speak for “their” women and culture. The nationalist emancipation of cultural and masculine sovereignty was therefore asserted not only against colonial power but also primarily through native women. The very argument that “our” culture is superior to “their” culture is ultimately an ideological contest between male-dominated colonial powers and male-dominated anti-colonial nationalists, in which women’s presence and conditions are largely invisible. Across both sides, men appropriated women merely as instruments in this contest and reinforced distinct forms of patriarchy. As Partha Chatterjee rightly observes, the woman’s question in these debates is primarily about the encounter between a colonial state and the imagined culture of the colonised people; it has little to do with women’s own lives or interests.

Feminism as a native struggle
It is a striking paradox that recent right-wing radical discourse in Bangladesh portrays feminism as a “Western agenda”. At its most basic level, women’s rights activism in non-Western regions cannot be considered an imported idea from the West, particularly given that Western societies themselves have consistently subjected women to various forms of mistreatment and oppression.

Feminist politics in Bangladesh emerged from women’s issues within local contexts, embedded in material realities that included dowry-related violence and murders, domestic abuse, child marriage, acid attacks, extra-judicial punishments imposed through shalish and fatwa, barriers to women’s education, discriminatory inheritance practices, violations of indigenous women’s rights, and many other local struggles. To mention a few cases: in 1993, Nurjahan, a rural woman, was sentenced to death by stoning after a shalish declared her second marriage invalid. In 2020, Nurunnahar, a fourteen-year-old eighth-grade student, was married to a thirty-four-year-old man and died from excessive genital bleeding and related injuries. These cases, along with numerous others, represent ongoing harm caused by “our” traditional practices, and they ground the social conditions to which feminism in Bangladesh directly responds.

It is important to remind ourselves that women in the West have also long been victims of patriarchy and oppression, and have fought for their rights. However, this does not mean that women in non-Western regions are simply copying them when they oppose mistreatment. The irony that must be recognised is that women all over the world are no strangers to gender inequality and abuse in their own regional contexts. This shared reality of women does not make the political activism of non-Western women a mimicry of the West.

No political ideology, nonetheless, is beyond critical judgement, and feminism is no exception. For example, South Asian feminist scholars have long critiqued “White feminism” for its exclusionary approaches. However, the recent radical right-wing campaign in Bangladesh that writes “magi” on Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s posters and publicly labels prominent feminist leaders as “beshha” at political gatherings does not constitute a critique of feminism; it is a deliberate strategy that seeks to delegitimise feminist intervention through intimidation and threat. It stems from the same historical masculine rage that opposed women’s voting rights, sought to keep women as second-class citizens, denied them access to education, and maintained social control by constructing women as inferior. Any woman or ideology that challenged this structure has historically been perceived as a threat to them. It is therefore important to situate these extreme radical campaigns within a longer history of gendered power formations that have organised violence, exclusion, and control over women in post-colonial Bangladesh.

-The Daily Star (Bangladesh)/ANN