The frenzied pace of harassment, gang rape and subse quent suicides in Bangladesh during the last few months has made it difficult to keep track of the specifics of each incident. Fahima, Rahima, Indrani, Sabina — these names and the horrific events associated with them have begun to blur into one another. There are also countless other women — like the two garment workers who were raped in their rented rooms in early March — whose names fail to find mention in news reports.
However, one of the most distressing aspects of the reports is the number of women and girls who have felt compelled to commit suicide in the aftermath of a violent and traumatic encounter. Their recourse to suicide could very well be the result of cultural constructions of honour and shame which do not allow for the acceptance of such 'tarnished' women into mainstream society. As an explanation, this provides a partial and tidy answer.
However, the path to suicide is one which defies easy categorisation. Moreover, for women who are not raped but suffer traumatic harassment, there are few social or legal options available for them to escape their condition. Conventional explanations of 'shame' suicides fail to explain, for instance, why in her suicide note Simi Banu wrote that the kind of harassment she had to endure was "worse than being raped and left by the wayside". It could very well be that shifts in social, economic and legal discourses in the past two decades have allowed women like Simi to 'opt out' of mainstream cultural ideologies of womanhood. By the same token, it is precisely because some women are not willing to submit unquestioningly to notions of purity and pollution that violence against them has taken on new, extensive forms.
For several reasons, an analysis of Simi's case illuminates many of the murky issues in this debate. First, she was a professional woman who was explicit in her rejection of the narrow, constraining 'traditional' female identity: she sought a broader social identity as a human being deserving of dignity. Second, she was never physically assaulted, yet she committed suicide. Third, at least according to available evidence, the incident did not involve any form of political retribution.