Our mothers fought so that their daughters need not fear the outside world

Alittle over a century ago, a girl who was to be named Sufia was born to a conservative Muslim family in Bengal. Like most of her female contemporaries across the world, there was absolutely no question of her being sent to a school of course. But Sufia was fortunate enough to have been born into an educated family. She was taught to read and write Persian and Arabic along with Urdu, the preferred language of communication among the Muslim upper classes of that region. Along with the other women in her family, she was forbidden from learning Bangla – the language of the “masses” as well as that of non-Muslims – in the name of protection. There was a big, bad world out there. Preventing women from learning the local vernacular would serve as yet another barrier to them communicating or fraternising with the rest of the world, serving to protect the women’s and the family’s “honour”. The two remain rather entwined in some communities today.

But Sufia was determined to learn Bangla. Luckily for her, the young man she was married to at 11 – himself fluent in Bangla – was just as eager for her to learn. The two would hold secret lessons in candlelight, hidden away from the elders inside great big wardrobes in the family home. Later that year, encouraged by her tutor husband, Sufia had her first Bangla story published in a local literary magazine. She would go on to become one of the most celebrated poets in Bangladesh and lead the women’s rights movement in her native country. On a personal level, even while she struggled to support a family as a penniless widow on a schoolteacher’s relatively pitiful salary, Sufia would make sure that her daughter’s school fees were paid so that she could explore the world in a way her mother wasn’t allowed.

Sufia was my grandmother. And this is just the story of one family. Countless other brave and audacious women – and men – have fought fearlessly to pave the way for the women of future generations, for women like me, to have a voice of our own, to have the freedom to study, to work, to explore the world, to stake our own claim in it. The world, after all, belongs to us just as much as it belongs to men.

The last couple of weeks have served as a deeply depressing reminder of the obstacles and abuse women continue to face even to this day. Most of us, if not all, have experienced abuse of one degree or another and it has taken decades of tireless activism to create an atmosphere where women finally feel able to talk about these often soul-destroying experiences – at least in this country. Let our daughters grow up in a world where they are never expected to suffer in silence, but let us also never make them feel that the world isn’t worth exploring because abusers exist. Let us make sure that they know that for every sex pest they’ll encounter, they’ll also have a father who believes in them, a husband who stays up with them when they’re chasing a column deadline or a producer turned friend who wouldn’t let their stage fright get the better of them.

Above all, let them know they’ll have more men prepared to listen to them than those who’ll want to silence them. Let our daughters never forget that women have an equal right to the bounties of this world and they should never be afraid to claim them. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;

at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

Is this hell? We appear to be locked in some horrible recurrent dream in which the same people say the same things again and again in varying tones of voice, but always with the same deadly intransigence. The “negotiations” over our exit from what was supposed to be a fraternal, cooperative, mutually beneficial association is now a hostage crisis in which the ransom cannot even be agreed, let alone met.

The two sides in the British political divide on Brexit are, ironically, in agreement that this process is utterly futile. For the irreconcilable Remain camp, this means only one thing: let’s call it off and stay in – or at least retreat to the safe harbour of a simulacrum of membership. For the tenacious Leave team, it confirms the worst expectations of malign EU intentions, so the only plausible solution is to pull the plug on the entire charade and walk away. Even if both sides are making use of this mess for their own ends, surely they are both right: this is hopeless.

Or is it? By the end of last week, much official effort seemed to be going into producing what Americans Bob was named winner of this year’s Cartoon Art Trust Awards prize for Political Cartooning

Twitter: @bobscartoons

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