The Royal Bengal Tiger is iconised as an expression of the natural grace and yet ferocity of Bengal, like its seasons. That feral association is richly deserved, and the tiger's spirit has entered the lives of the humans who co-inhabit his Bengal.

A news item circulating on social media pictures a policeman showing former Home Minister Asaduzzzman Khan a visual recording of the police shooting demonstrators during the student-led movement. The policeman points out that when one protester is injured or even killed in the firing, the rest of the crowd refuses to run. This is how revolutions are made. Each protester who refuses to flee is a Royal Bengal Tiger. He does not desert Bengal.

But what about the Royal Bengal Tigress? Anika Tasnim and others like her qualify for that title. Their fearless poise, their raised voices and their determination to stay the political course complement the work of their male counterparts. They stalk the terrain of the times with the purposeful gait of a tigress who walks the wilds with the tiger, both of them striding on, very much in the vanguard of Bengali history.

Every tigress (and tiger) is born a cub. I witnessed a cub in a video about a school incident. Two years ago, to this month, there was a protest by students and guardians of Viqarunnisa Noon School, who blocked Mirpur Road in Dhanmondi-7 following a "rumour" that the local branch of that famed institution, which operated from rented premises, would be shifted from the area.

One girl stands out in the video. I do not know her name, but the video calls her Rajpother Baghini: the Tigress of the Royal Road. She and her comrades-in-childhood prevent cars from breaking through the blockade. Their timeless Bengali chant, "Amader dabi mante hobey" ("You will have to accede to our demands") is nuanced by daring acts of defiance. At one point, the girl and her companions accost the occupants of a car and berate them for pleading for passage. "Don't you have legs? Can't you walk?" she asks them. Demanding a permanent campus, the girls shout: "Amader dabi mante hobe. Sthayi campus korte hobe."

Nothing in life endures unless it is turned into art. This Royal Bengal Tigress cub is made up of anger. She can be so angry that when she confronts opposition, her eyes close in a visceral rejection of sight even as her voice rises to a crescendo of protest. The videographer, who has been merely recording the event, is overwhelmed and turns into a participant observer. He places his hand on the girl's head in spontaneous blessing. A Royal Bengal Tiger has passed on his lineage to a cub who is not even his own. Life and the journalism which records it has passed into art - the art of inhabiting the remaining Sundarbans of Bengali selfhood.

Protesting children

Admittedly, Viqarunnisa Noon School is an elite institution, and so the protesting students could be seen as individuals trying to protect their privileged turf from encroachment by economic realities that less-privileged children take for granted. Also, it is not known whether and how far the girls stood by their economically and socially deprived peers when the latter encountered displacement, whether educational or economic or social. Hence, should not the Viqarunnisa protests be dismissed for having been, well, bourgeois?No. Let no one denigrate the unsentimental vigour with which the Viqarunnisa girls defended their terrain. No one can be everyone at once. No family can be every family at the same time. No school can be every school at once. In the act of trying to protect their school from being relocated to other premises, the Viqarunnisa girls took a symbolic stance against the anonymous workings of the market and its physical capture and transfer of existential property: the wrapper of the first toffee that Abba fetched in the Kalboisakhi rain; the first lipstick stolen from Amma's dressing table; Dadi's waiting smile in the ancestral village home; and the beloved's quarrel with the school's guardian walls outside which stood all lovers-to-be. Such things do not belong to children: Children belong to them. Children carry within themselves those legacies of innocent times to resist the fallen insecurities of adulthood.

The cub grows up to be a tigress because of the fairy tales that she carries within her. Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 classic, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, argues that fairy tales help children to resolve existential problems, such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict and sibling rivalry, by deflecting them into the hands of adult authorship which succeeds in finding a happy ending to every sad tale most of the time.

Bengal's inherited repertoire of fairy tales offers children a virtual tapestry on which to paint their visions of the adult world that they wish to inhabit. Apart from tales collected by Lal Behari Dey, there are Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder's Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother's Bag of Stories) and Thakurdadar Jhuli (Grandfather's Bag of Stories), and the works of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and Ashraf Siddiqui, among many others. Their fairy tales bring fantasy within personal, material reach.

The Viqarunnisa students are beneficiaries of a living Bengali tradition. Their imaginative learning began at home, perhaps in the oral presence of grandmothers and grandfathers who transmitted to their young wards what they, the elderly, themselves had imbibed as children. Once the children grew up, they beat reality in the face with the power that they had drawn from the magic strength of reality turned into a story.

The story continues. The Viqarunnisa girls will have children one day. Those girls, too, will learn to protest as naturally as they drink their mothers' milk. The students' movement would have created a new and better Bangladesh by then.

But no change means perfection. There will be a protesting child somewhere who will shut her eyes and scream into the anguished skies.

Our Bengal will live on, its passing life turned into lasting art.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com