On August 5 last year, when the Awami League government collapsed under the weight of a student-led uprising, anger poured into the streets like a flood. By nightfall, nearly 1,500 statues, murals, and monuments across the country had been smashed or defaced.
Among the ruins lay the faces of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the four national leaders murdered in 1975, and countless other icons of Bangladesh’s past. Even memorials to the Liberation War, sacred reminders of sacrifice and struggle, were not spared.
Nowhere did the devastation cut deeper than inside Dhaka University, at the far end of Fuller Road. There stood Shamim Sikder’s monumental work Shadhinata Sangram, once a proud testament to the nation’s long road to independence. On its triangular island, 116 busts of poets, scientists, revolutionaries and political leaders stood shoulder to shoulder Vidyasagar, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Lalon and many more. On that August day, almost all were reduced to rubble. Only five remain standing.
On July 4 this year, two undergraduates, Ferdous Alam, a botany student, and Md. Ripon Ahmed, studying mass communication and journalism, handed a petition to Vice-Chancellor Professor Niaz Ahmed Khan. Their plea was simple: restore Shadhinata Sangram.
“It is painful and shameful to see such an important work of art for the nation lying in ruins,” they wrote.
The sculptures are not mere decoration. They are the timelines carved in stone. The Language Movement of 1952, the Six-Point demand of 1966, the uprising of 1969, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s March 7 call for freedom, the March 25 massacre and the final victory of December 16, 1971. It was meant to be a living classroom, where every passerby could stand before history and feel its weight.
Today, the site looks more like a graveyard. Headless torsos lie scattered across the ground. Shattered faces of poets and politicians are piled like debris in corners.
Art historians see the destruction as part of a bitter cycle where politics consumes symbols. “When regimes fall, monuments fall with them,” one Dhaka University Professor said, asking not to be named. “But what is lost is not just stone and cement. It is our history, our identity.”
The university has said it wants to restore the work, but red tape and funding questions have slowed progress. Students, meanwhile, continue to push, unwilling to let the silence linger.
As Bangladesh looks for a way forward, the broken faces of Shadhinata Sangram remain. They are more than ruins; they are reminders. Governments may rise and fall in the flames of revolution, but memory, once shattered, is harder to rebuild.
