LITERATURE-SOUTH ASIA: Exiled Writer Seeks New Home

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

KOLKATA, Jun 4 2002 (IPS) - The suspicious eyes of the security guards outside a suite in the Great Eastern Hotel in this eastern India metropolis confirm Taslima Nasrin is in.

The scattered books, a laptop, piled up cigarette butts and paper coffee cups strewn all over the dimly-lit room also bear testimony to the rather disheveled life of the exiled Bangladeshi writer.

But Nasrin now says she wants to stay here, amidst Bengali culture and language, for as long as she is unable to go back to Bangladesh.

“I write in Bengali. Unless I live in a place where Bengali is spoken and where the culture is Bengali my literary talents would dry up,”says Nasrin, who now calls her Great Eastern suite, which is frequented by the Bengali intelligentsia, home.

“Since my chances of returning to Bangladesh is near impossible, I want to stay in West Bengal as much as possible,” says the doctor-turned-writer. “Bengal is my home now. Permission to stay in West Bengal is my last straw. If the Indian government grants me six months visa every year like now I would be very happy.”

In 1993, Nasrin had angered Bangladeshi Islamic fundamentalists when she dared to challenge the “anti-women” tenets of Islam through columns that focused on the oppression of women there, and Muslim laws.

The Bangladeshi government would also later ban her book, ‘Lajja’ (Shame), on the atrocities committed by Bangladesh’s Muslim majority on the Hindu minority.

The fundamentalists handed down a death sentence for her and a general strike was even held in Bangladesh calling for her execution. Nasrin also experienced being attacked in a book fair and being placed under house arrest.

She was formally charged in court of offending the religious sentiments of Muslims, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. But Nasrin was granted bail and allowed to visit other countries so long as she sought permission from a judge.

During one of those foreign trips, she was offered asylum in Sweden, where she then lived briefly. Nasrin, though, soon began to shuttle from one Western country to another – until she wound up here in Kolkata.

Nasrin, now 40, thinks she has finally found her second home. She says, “Here I am free to move anywhere. Though the security guards accompany me I am happy. Yes, the hand of the fundamentalist is very long and so perhaps I have security threats here too.”

“Earlier, the Congress government in New Delhi denied me (a) visa to come to India,” she says. “Now under the BJP government, I have got a visa. But then I am not sure I would get it again.”

Still, she says she does not regret writing any of her works, even those that got her into trouble.

“There are movements worldwide in Islamic countries to improve the lot of the women by making liberal interpretations of the Koran,” says Nasrin. “But I cannot make any positive interpretation of Koran even now as the Book clearly says men are superior to women. What positive interpretation you make of that?”

“There are protests against fundamentalists in Bangladesh,” she notes. “But no one touched religion. My crime was to challenge the religion. I protested against the anti-women Islamic laws as I grew up in Bangladesh and saw the religion from close and the oppression on women in the name of that.”

“The fundamentalists are there everywhere,” Nasrin says. “But the dangerous trend in Bangladesh is that whichever party comes to power tries to placate them and seek their help and make them part of their regime.”

She says even the moderate Awami League government had prevented her from re-entering Bangladesh four years ago. Nasrin had to change her name so that she could make a surreptitious visit to her then ailing mother.

“The new immigration officer failed to recognise me,” she recounts. “But the following day he lost his job and since my return was splashed across the front pages of all news papers I had to go into hiding again.”

Nasrin was later allowed to leave the country, but Bangladesh’s leading fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, threatened the then Awami League government with “bad consequences”. The Jamaat-e-Islami is part of the present ruling coalition in Bangladesh.

Asked to comment on the communal convulsions between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat and to compare them to the religious upheavals in her homeland, Nasrin says she has “condemned the Gujarat incidents” in her columns.

She adds, “But here in India, the positive side is the number of protests against such atrocities. And the basic difference between Gujarat and Bangladesh is that the minority in my country cannot think of retaliation.”

“So I call Gujarat violence communal riots and the one happening in Bangladesh genocide,” she says. “The Hindus in Bangladesh cannot think of a backlash. Here the Muslims are fleeing from Gujarat, but to other parts of India and not (to) Pakistan.”

Nasrin also believes that had ‘Lajja’ been written in India, “it would not have been proscribed”. In 1999, the Bangladeshi government banned another one of Nasrin’s books, ‘Amar Meyabela’ (My Girlhood).

Nasrin is currently busy writing an autobiography, which she plans to call ‘Utal Hawa’ (Gusty Wind). She says it will cover her life between the ages of 16 and 26.

In the meantime, her recently released novel, ‘French Lover’, has gotten mixed reviews.

In truth, its graphic accounts of lovemaking and the tectonic sexuality of its protagonist Nijanjana, a Kolkata Bengali woman in search of identity in Europe after her marriage to an unexciting man in Paris, seem to be getting the most attention over its other elements.

Nasrin, however, explains her approach, “I have brought sex in details because I feel women in the subcontinent are still very passive. Being passive is like a virtue while in the West you don’t get kudos for being passive.”

But India’s largest circulated weekly, ‘Outlook’, said in a review of the book, “Nasrin’s world vision is so limited, her heroine is constantly mistaking politics for poetry.”

“I think,” Nasrin responds, “my critics have failed to understand what I wanted to say. Or may be it was my failure to communicate.”

“I wanted to portray a woman caught in the conflict between the Western and Eastern cultures,” she says. “It dwells upon racism, insecurity of minorities and the slave mentality of the people of the subcontinent so in regard to the whites.”

“You may call me a feminist,” she continues. “But I think I am protesting only against oppression and I would continue to stand by people who are meted out injustice. Why should people suffer in this world?”