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“More Sexpression Please!” 79

themselves as culturally inclined and modern middle-class Bangladeshis
(see Chowdhury 2006). The demands on female bodily comportment,
however, were not unique to Shima’s in-laws. They are widely shared
among Bangladeshi religious communities and have been crucial in the
formation of modern Bengali identity in East Bengal (see Rosario 1992).
The imagination of a modern Bengali Muslim identity in East Bengal
was crucially centered on gender difference and class. In the colonial con-
text, the rise of a Muslim middle class in early twentieth-century Bengal
took shape within a force field of colonial preoccupations with the position
of “native” women as well as the interlocking of different communities
within the colonial arena (Amin 1995; Sarkar 2001). Rahnuma Ahmed
has shown how the debates in early twentieth-century colonial Bengal pro-
duced “a consistent modernist position [that] can be identified [among
middle-class Bengali Muslims] which was based on the theory of progress
as a meta-narrative: simply put, it stood for freedom from ignorance, from
religious blindness and superstition, and adherence to what were regarded
as ‘meaningless’ customs. It argued for the rational re-ordering of nation
and society, and of the family” (Ahmed 1999, 114). This classic tale of
modernity’s metanarrative became crucially focused on the position of
Muslim women, marked in colonial representations as wretched victims of
seclusion and the decadent lifestyles of polygamous Muslim men. “Middle
class women writers were near unanimous in singling out porda or seclu-
sion as the reason for their ‘backwardness,’ for their lack of status and
power. Seclusion was looked upon as irrational, outmoded and barbaric”
(115). In colonial Bengal, the participation of middle-class women in pub-
lic life became a marker of modernity and civilization.

This new “publicness” of women was however not without its prescriptions:
Among Bengali Muslims the dismantling of seclusion was accompanied by
repeated cautioning which urged women not to lose their sense of “shame”
or “modesty.” Male-female segregation was transformed from a central spa-
tial division of society to an “inner” feeling; a “bodily” feeling which was
quintessentially feminine. A redefined sense of shame redrew boundaries
around sexual propriety and sexual conduct considered appropriate for a
woman belonging to the respectable class. (Ibid., 117)

This translated into a particular comportment and dress in the public life
of Bengali Muslim women. Himani Bannerjee has argued for their Hindu
counterparts that the Bengali gentle lady, “the moral/aesthetic/erotic con-
figuration of women of propertied classes in Bengal,” became projected “as
a visual-moral sign” through their “[a]ppearance, in the sense of body-self
presentation through clothing” (Bannerjee 1997, 75). Clothing became “a
moral signifier of her social role and thus of what [was seen] as the culture