Long before the streets of Bangladesh erupted in July 2024, a generation of school and college students had been developing a political consciousness that often seemed way different from that of the adults around them.
They spoke differently, organized differently and carried a kind of raw, unfiltered certainty into public life. The country had seen it before, most memorably during the 2018 road-safety movement, when teenagers in school uniforms poured onto Dhaka’s streets demanding something seemingly simple of ensuring safer roads and accountability.
Six years later, another generation followed them.
In June and early July 2024, protests flickered on and off at Dhaka University, Jahangirnagar University and a handful of other campuses. The movement had not yet acquired the scale, fury or historical weight it would soon carry.
But college students were already beginning to gather at Science Lab, one of central Dhaka’s busiest intersections.
“We came here to help our elder brothers of Dhaka University,” one of them said, as I remember while standing guard on the road myself against the tyranny.
There was something revealing in the simplicity of the explanation. They did not necessarily arrive armed with elaborate political theories or carefully rehearsed arguments.
They understood that other students were struggling, and they believed they should stand beside them. Their politics, at least at first, seemed to grow from an instinctive sense of solidarity.
Then the protests exploded. And so did the teenagers’ role in them.
As the confrontation intensified, school and college students became increasingly visible on the streets, often still wearing their uniforms. They were attacked, chased and injured alongside university students and other protesters.
At times, their willingness to confront the police appeared even more startling precisely because of how young they were.
On July 16, shortly after noon, students from Dhaka College, Ideal College, Dhaka City College, Birshreshtha Noor Mohammad Public College and Birshreshtha Munshi Abdur Rouf Public College began blockading the Science Lab intersection.
I watched them confront the police. The thing that struck me was their lack of hesitation. In the running battles that followed, protesters hurled stones and scattered under police charges, only to regroup and return.
Many of the teenagers had come wearing school or college uniforms, their identity cards still hanging around their necks.
There were practical reasons for this. Some appeared to carry an almost innocent conviction that the police would not seriously harm students who were visibly identifiable as schoolchildren.
For others, putting on a uniform was part of the deception required to leave home without alarming their parents. The uniforms also served another purpose: amid the confusion of the streets, they allowed students to recognize one another, cluster together and feel that they belonged to something larger than themselves.
By July 18, students from schools, colleges and madrasas had begun building resistance around the Jigatola bus stand area. A police charge dispersed them, but not for long. They regrouped opposite City College, near Science Lab, chanting slogans as rows of police officers took position in front of them.
Police periodically fired tear gas and sound grenades. The students scattered, coughed, regrouped and returned with bricks.
There was a recklessness to some of these confrontations that distinguished the teenagers from many of the adults around them. They taunted the police with slogans, gestures and defiance, seemingly determined to demonstrate that intimidation would not send them home.
They behaved at times as though the possibility of becoming a shaheed — a martyr — was not enough to frighten them away.
Nabiha, then a ninth-grade student at Mohammadpur Preparatory School and College, was among those who went to Science Lab that day.
“My friend and I were planning to join the protest,” she recalled. “We joined an Instagram group at our school for that. But then we got detached because of the internet shutdown. I went to the Science Lab and saw hundreds of students. I started chanting slogans with them. For the first time, I experienced the smell of tear gas. It was awful.”
Her reason for being there was even more straightforward.
“I decided to join because the police were killing people ruthlessly,” she said. “So I thought I needed to be on the street.”
The uprising would eventually claim the lives of young people across Bangladesh, including teenagers whose names became part of the memory of those weeks. Shahrian Khan Anas, Naima Sultana and Farhan Faiyaz were among the young people killed.
But perhaps the clearest demonstration of this generation’s instincts came after the uprising itself.
Following Sheikh Hasina’s departure from power on August 5, police largely disappeared from the streets amid the upheaval. Traffic management in Dhaka and elsewhere quickly descended into disorder.
The teenagers stepped in.
Before officials could devise a plan, school and college students were standing at intersections directing buses, cars and rickshaws. They worked under the sun, gesturing vehicles forward, stopping others, clearing lanes and trying to impose order on cities suddenly without their familiar traffic police.
No one had needed to formally assign them the job. They saw a vacuum and moved to fill it.
That impulse had been visible throughout the uprising: an unusual mixture of innocence and political awareness, youthful recklessness and civic responsibility. They could confront rows of police officers one week and direct traffic at chaotic intersections the next.
They were young enough to deceive their parents by leaving home in school uniforms, yet old enough to believe that what was happening outside their homes belonged to them, too.
And when Bangladesh entered one of the most uncertain moments in its history, they did not wait for adults to tell them what needed to be done… they simply showed up.
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Sabiha Nahla is an aspiring painter. She worked in the July Memorial museum