A year ago, during the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) election, several candidates and panels spoke about the restrictions on female students’ halls. Among their promises was to work towards removing the restrictions on the entry and exit of female students from their residential halls.
A year later, we are still talking about the same issue. This time, the demand is coming from Oborodhbashini, a platform of female students at Dhaka University that has been protesting the restrictions on women’s hall access for more than a month.
Oborodhbashini has placed three demands before the university administration. It wants the 10pm-to-6am restriction on female halls to be abolished and 24-hour access to the halls to be ensured. It also wants female students to be able to enter other women’s halls with valid university identification and, with permission, stay there overnight. Finally, it wants female relatives, including mothers and sisters, to be allowed to enter the halls. The demands make it clear that this movement is not only about the time at which the gates close. It is also about women’s access, mobility and autonomy within university residential spaces.
The university’s response has so far been to extend the entry time by one hour. From September 1, female students have been allowed to enter their halls until 11pm instead of 10pm, while a committee has also been formed to look into the problems faced by female students. But this one-hour extension does not answer the main question: why should there be a separate time restriction for female students in the first place?
I ask this question not only as an observer of the current movement, but as someone who lived under this rule. I was a resident of Rokeya Hall for more than two and a half years during my university life. Like many other students, I had tuition classes, programmes, work and other commitments outside the campus. Students who come from outside Dhaka often have their own responsibilities and reasons for being outside. The 10pm deadline affected all of them.
We knew that if the clock moved towards 10pm, we had to start thinking about getting back. Sometimes it was not even in our hands. Dhaka traffic, a delayed bus or an unexpected situation could make someone late. And being late did not simply mean arriving at one’s own residence later than usual. It meant asking for permission. There was a system for late entry, where students could apply, contacting the house tutor and explaining why they needed to return after the stipulated time. In some situations, there were emergency arrangements. But that itself was another process.
This is where I think the discussion about the hall restriction needs to go beyond the question of emergencies. Perhaps the most important question in this entire debate is a simple one: why should a female student need an emergency to be allowed to come home? Why should she need a late pass, an application or an explanation? Why can returning to her own hall not simply be a normal part of being a university student? Why can it not simply be about freedom?
Male students at Dhaka University do not face the same restriction. They can return to their residential halls at any hour. We are students of the same university. We attend the same classes, pay the same tuition and other fees, and participate in the same academic and extracurricular activities. Yet the university has different rules for its male and female students when it comes to something as basic as returning to their residence.
The usual justification for this difference is safety. Safety is, of course, a legitimate concern. Dhaka University and its surrounding areas are not free from risks at night. Anyone who has walked around Shahbagh or Raju Bhaskarja Road knows that there are poorly lit areas and places where students can feel unsafe. I have seen this myself. Male and female students can face harassment, pickpocketing and other problems in these areas.
And safety cannot mean that the solution is always to restrict the person who may face the danger. If the university is concerned about the safety of its students, it should work to make the university and its surrounding areas safer for everyone. If there is inadequate lighting, it should improve the lighting. If students face harassment, there should be stronger security and accountability. If transportation is a problem, the university should look for safer transportation options. Addressing these real hazards is the actual solution.
There is also a basic question about the one-hour extension. If the campus was considered unsafe after 10pm, what suddenly makes it safe until 11pm? And if students can safely return at 11pm, why can they not make their own decisions about returning at midnight or 1am? The point is not that every female student needs to be outside at those hours. Many may prefer to return earlier. The point is that the university should not make that decision for every female student simply because she is a woman.
The contradiction becomes even more difficult to ignore when we remember the role of female students in the July 2024 movement. After the then prime minister’s controversial remarks about the quota protesters, female students from Rokeya Hall and other women’s halls broke through their hall gates and came out to join the protests. They did so at a time when the university was going through a major political crisis. The gates that were supposed to restrict their movement did not stop them when they believed they had a reason to come out.
These were the same female students who could organise, protest and take part in a national movement. It is difficult to understand why the same students are considered incapable of deciding when they should return to their own halls.
There is also a problem with the way the safety argument is sometimes discussed. The university proctor made a derogatory comment suggesting that women in his household do not stay outside after 10pm and questioning what kind of women need to be outside at that time. But the lifestyle of women in one administrator’s household cannot be the standard for thousands of university students. They should not have to prove that their reason is important enough. A university is supposed to prepare its students for independent lives. Female students are expected to study, work, conduct research, participate in organisations, debate, lead and make decisions about their own futures. Freedom cannot suddenly become conditional after a certain hour.
This is not a new debate at Dhaka University. In the 1990s, the restriction on women’s halls reportedly required female students to return by 6pm. Students protested against the rule, and the time was eventually extended. Yet the basic distinction between male and female students remained. Over the years, women students have repeatedly had to negotiate for more time. The clock has moved, but the principle has remained. That is why the current movement is important. Oborodhbashini is not simply asking the university to move the deadline from 10pm to 11pm. It is asking the university to question why the deadline exists at all.
More than a century ago, Begum Rokeya wrote Oborodhbashini, a collection of accounts of women living under extreme forms of seclusion. The book was published in 1931 and contains 47 episodes about women’s lives under the then rigid practices of purdah. Rokeya often used satire to tell these stories, but the situations she described were deeply painful. Women were confined to their homes, denied ordinary freedom of movement and sometimes placed in situations where the restrictions meant to preserve their honour caused them suffering.
It is difficult to imagine that women once had to live with such restrictions. Yet decades later, the form of restriction has changed, even if the question of women’s freedom has not completely disappeared. The women in Oborodhbashini were restricted by the walls of their homes. Today’s female students can be restricted by the gates of their halls. The circumstances are obviously not the same. Women’s education has expanded, women occupy public spaces in ways that would have been difficult to imagine in Rokeya’s time, and female students at Dhaka University have repeatedly shown their ability to organise and participate in public life. But perhaps that is exactly why the current debate matters. We should not be satisfied every time the wall becomes a little shorter or the gate stays open for one more hour. We should ask why there needs to be a wall at all.
