Like a Bird, She Wants All Girls to Fly

In her Rajabazar locality of Kolkata, Shahina Javed watched how males tormented their female family members. When the teenager questioned her parents about the fate of the females in their families, the girl was told to shut her mouth and abide by the community norms. Her father, with his paper-bag-making job, and her mother, a housewife, trained their only daughter, born in 1989, to endure the inhuman tortures that would follow her too after her marriage.

- F. M. BRITTO

But these incidents worried Shahina. How many of our women will go on getting tortured and killed by their husbands, she wondered. Having joined an NGO, Shahina became more aware of the violence women suffer. She realized that in the name of her religion so many social restrictions had been imposed on women.

Since Shahina means ‘bird’, like a bird she too wanted to fly. She refused to don a traditional hijab.

While this angered her family and community, she stood undaunted. Though her father did not want her to study beyond metric, she pursued her Masters in Social Work from Calcutta University.