The Orna 's Secular Aesthetics and the Cultural Politics of Selfhood in Contemporary Bangladesh

Abstract: The orna —a length of material many women in South Asia wear as a scarf to cover the chest and/or head, with a shalwar kameez or over a saree—has not received the kind of mainstream academic recognition as the veil, or its most popularized version known as the hijab. Over the last decade, significant scholarly debate has proceeded over veiling's relationship to Bangladeshi nationalism, Muslim female subjectivity, and national identity formation but a definitive investigation into the various meanings attached to the orna has not yet materialized. This article probes into the orna 's relationship to broader feminist scholarship on Bangladesh, and attempts to understand Bangladesh's histories of gender, religion, and secular nationalism. It begins by interrogating the conceptual and performative slippage between the orna and veil and interprets the wearing of the orna as a potentially subversive, performative act, as well as an exercise of self. Eventually, through an analysis of the everyday interpellations of orna surveillance that demonstrates the fraught terrain of female respectability and modernity in contemporary Bangladesh, the article delves into the cultural politics of female self-fashioning, feminist protest movements, and state and moral policing in contemporary Bangladesh.