Ferdowsi priyabhashini biography

Ferdousi Priyabhashini (19 February 1947 – 6 March 2018) was a Bangladeshi sculptor.
Ferdousi Priyabhashini was a Bangladeshi sculptor.
Ferdousi Priyabhashini who was declared a freedom fighter in Bangladesh in 2016 and was reportedly the first woman to publicly announce herself as a birangona.

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Ferdousi Priyabhashini’s 2nd death anniversary today

Today is the 2nd death anniversary of late Independence Award winning sculptor and freedom fighter Ferdousi Priyabhashini.

Priyabhashini was born on February 19, 1947 in Khulna. She was the first woman to publicly announce herself as a ‘birangana’.

Ferodousi Priyabhashini was also recognised as a ‘Hero’ by the famed Reader’s Digest magazine in December 2004, for the valour she displayed in acknowledging herself as a war heroine.

After the liberation war, Priyabhashini gradually emerged as a sculptor who used waste materials.

Her first exhibition was jointly inaugurated by artist SM Sultan and poet Sufia Kamal.

She showcased her sculptures in many acclaimed shows in Dhaka and elsewhere.

Her works are often devoid of any polish to give the impression of the roughness of her materials and also to go with its natural colour and texture.

After the end of the liberation war, Priyabhashini stood by the women who suffered at the hands of the Pakistani occupation army and their local collaborators.

Her life and works inspired

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The following edited extract is taken from Anam Zakaria’s wonderful book 1971 and includes difficult content including violence and sexual violence that requires real consideration before using in the classroom.Questions that could guide a sensitive class discussion can be found below and could be used alongside a glossaryand timeline.

‘For eight months, I was a rape victim . . . each moment, every moment, they took me. When the war was ending, in November [1971], they threw me in a concentration camp . . . there, in the barracks, I saw what they [were] doing. I cannot even explain it because it is so inhumane. It is beyond my . . . uh . . . my imagination . . . beyond anyone’s imagination, the kind of torture [inflicted] on every woman there. Even I was tortured (in the camp) for thirty-two hours. I cried, I shouted to be released . . .’

This was Ferdousi Priyabhashini who was declared a freedom fighter in Bangladesh in 2016 and was reportedly the first woman to publicly announce herself as a birangona, a war heroine. 9 Born in 1947, Ferdousi would go on t

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The inspiring life of Ferdousi Priyabhashini

Long before there was “me too”, there was a woman who rose to say, “It was me.” She was not the first to say so, for there had been others, but the context in which she rose to speak up made her declaration crucial. Anywhere in the world, it takes a considerable amount of bravery for a woman to say in public that she has been sexually assaulted, but it is all the more courageous to do so in a deeply conservative society emerging from a liberation war, political upheavals, and amidst growing religious fundamentalism.

Ferdousi Priyabhashini, who died at 71 in Dhaka on Tuesday, displayed her courage many times over—not only in surviving months of sexual assaults and violence at the hands of officers of the Pakistani armed forces, or for speaking out about her suffering, which was shared by many but which had remained unmentionable for years, but also for embracing the title, birangona, the brave one, and leading a sustained campaign to create awareness, in Bangladesh and beyond, about what hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi women h