Dr Shamsunnahar Kamal, Chief Medical Officer of Chittagong Port Hospital in 1971, carried out some of the most dangerous forms of support work for the Liberation War—largely unrecorded in official histories. With all three of her sons fighting, she turned her home and hospital into a covert medical corridor for freedom fighters, supplying medicine to border camps and sheltering injured fighters inside her clinic rooms.
On the night of November 17, Razakars surrounded her house and opened fire. Inside, several fighters were hiding. Dr Kamal quickly laid them on clinic beds, covered them with white sheets, and arranged the room to appear like a ward. When Khoka, the leader of the group, stormed in with armed men, they pointed their weapons at her and demanded she hand over the fighters.
As they moved to search the beds, one Razakar grabbed her and another wrapped a telephone wire around her neck. When freedom fighter Bishwas tried to intervene, he was shot in the leg, collapsing on the floor. Dr Kamal, refusing to break, stood between the gunmen and the injured men. Her defiance stalled the attack long enough that Khoka abruptly ordered his men to leave.
Her actions that night saved lives—yet her name rarely appears in national narratives of 1971. BDFA highlights her story to remind us that countless women took risks equal to combat, building networks of survival that the war depended on but history continues to overlook.
Bangladesh Feminist Archives 