Sandhya Ain: The debate over Dhaka University's female hall curfew

At 10 pm, the gates of Dhaka University's five female residential halls close for the night. For the thousands of women who live behind them, that rule is not simply about curfew hours — it is about where the university's responsibility for their safety begins and ends, and who bears the risk beyond those parameters. 

A growing student movement, organising under the banner of Oborodhbasini, is now challenging that question, and with it, assumptions built into the hall system for decades.

Under what students call the Sandhya Ain, or "sunset law", a woman who returns after 10pm can be turned away from her own hall. The rule is framed as protection, but it leaves little room for exceptions — work commitments, university activities, family emergencies, or simply the unpredictability of moving through the city after dark. 

The movement refers to the curfew as the Sandhya Ain to frame the law as a colonial-era rule (a fiscal rule established under the Permanent Settlement of 1793 by Lord Cornwallis, requiring zamindars to pay their land revenue by sunset on a specific date or risk losing their lands) that has outlasted the circumstances that produced it. Over time, it has become synonymous with everyday bureaucracy of university life — routine enough that its necessity is rarely questioned.

But a student who is out late does not stop facing the risks of the city once the clock strikes 10; being locked out can leave her with fewer options for reaching somewhere safe, not more.

As Adite Islam, a Dhaka University student involved in the movement, put it, a system meant to protect women by restricting their movement can end up exposing them to the very risks it claims to guard against.

From workplaces and cities to healthcare and bureaucracies, institutions have often been organised around an assumed universal subject who was, more often than not, male. When women ask for these structures to change, their demands can be treated as exceptions requiring special justification.

For women's rights activist and development practitioner Marzia Prova, the debate goes beyond campus security. "Our struggle is always framed as a binary choice between safety and freedom," she said. "What the protesters are demanding isn't just campus security. It's a female student's right to be a free citizen on campus."

The question extends beyond the university gate. 

In The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, urban theorist Elizabeth Wilson explores a similar contradiction: cities neither simply liberate women nor simply constrain them. They do both at once — opening up possibilities to work, study and live independently, while also producing the rules and fears that regulate the very freedom they make possible.

The question, however, is not only political but constitutional, according to Barrister Sara Hossain, executive director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST). "The Constitution says that women cannot be discriminated against at any level of the state or public life. It also prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. In that context, there should not be separate systems for men's and women's dormitories," she said.

There is, in theory, a way around the curfew: a student who expects to be late can apply for a gate pass. But this does not resolve the problem so much as relocate it, replacing an outright restriction with a web of permissions — informing roommates, obtaining a floor matron's signature, and securing approval from hall authorities. 

The system rarely states outright that a woman cannot stay out late; instead, each activity comes with one more procedure to complete. That burden falls hardest on students whose lives do not fit the narrow freedoms the rule assumes: those who work alongside their studies, take part in theatre or journalism, attend cultural events, or simply need to move through the city on their own terms.

I'd left my father at the hospital. By the time I made it back, it was late, and I wasn't allowed into my own hall. In the middle of the night, I had to go from door to door at my relatives' homes, looking for a place to stay.

Anonymous female student, Dhaka University

That objection runs deeper than a complaint about inconvenience, as the stories collected by the movement make clear. 

"I'd left my father at the hospital. By the time I made it back, it was late, and I wasn't allowed into my own hall. In the middle of the night, I had to go from door to door at my relatives' homes, looking for a place to stay," wrote one Dhaka University student, dropping her account into one of the golper bakshos (story boxes) set up outside the university's female halls. 

Over the course of a week, nearly 300 such stories were collected. Students wrote of rushing back before the gates closed, cutting short work or university activities; of mothers who could only meet their daughters at the gate rather than inside; and of non-residential students turned away even when they simply wanted to eat lunch between classes.

The restrictions extend beyond residential students, then, touching non-residential students and visiting female relatives as well, whose access to the halls can be just as difficult.

Those experiences sit behind Oborodhbasini's three central demands: lifting the 10pm–6am restriction so that female students can move safely around the clock; allowing any female student to enter any female hall with a valid university ID, with permission required only for overnight stays; and allowing female relatives of residents to enter the halls.

Medical emergencies have also tested the limits of the curfew system. Students could face restrictions on leaving the hall even when they needed urgent care, according to Adite. 

Sultana Akter Lubna, a student at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), described similar restrictions in the residential halls of her university. "Even during medical emergencies, we were not allowed to leave without the provost's permission. But if the provost did not answer the phone at night, there was no way for anyone to leave," she said. 

TBS approached the provosts of Dhaka University's female halls for comment on the students' concerns and the ongoing movement. The provost of Begum Rokeya Hall said it was too early to comment; a meeting would be held to discuss the issue, after which a decision would be made.

The movement has also drawn a response beyond its formal demands. As the protests spread online, discussion has often shifted from students' demands to their personal lives, with some protesters facing mockery, moral judgement and online sexual harassment.

For Lubna, this fits a broader pattern in which students who challenge administrative rules find themselves opposed by those who benefit from the status quo. She says little changed at SUST between their protests in 2022 and again in 2024, even after the mass uprising. 

Students with closer ties to the administration — whether aligned with the former ruling party's student wing or with right-leaning groups — tend to defend its position, she argues, and are sometimes among those who harass women for staying out late.

Women themselves hold different views on what safety, freedom and institutional protection should look like, Marzia Prova points out. Class, ethnicity, ideology and personal experience all shape whether women support movements like this one, while social pressure or a reluctance to engage in activism can keep others from taking part even when they privately agree.

The three demands, then, matter beyond the question of hall access alone. Winning them would resolve one specific grievance, but it would not by itself settle the larger question of how the university protects its female students, inside the halls or outside them. For now, though, unlocking even that one issue would mark a significant shift — for the women of Dhaka University, and for others elsewhere watching how the debate unfolds.