Dawn
26 November 2007
DATELINE NEW DELHI:
The shame of an ill-informed debate about Taslima Nasrin
by Jawed Naqvi
For many who have taken sides on the Taslima Nasrin debate she is the author of the novel Lajja, which translates as Shame. The story is made out to be about ill treatment of Hindus in Bangladesh by the majority Muslims, which was enough for the BJP to get hold of the book, translate it into Hindi and use of it for its narrow propaganda. The slightly more knowing pretenders would add that she is a feminist who provokes controversies. I too hadn’t read Lajja till last week even though the book has been lying on my desk for years. But now I have also read a brilliant paper on the Bengali author by Prof Kabir Chowdhury who presented it to me in Dhaka in 1997. Saikat Chowdhury is the co-author of this paper, which I shall share with the readers. But let’s discuss the current context first.
Taslima Nasrin has been living in Kolkata for some time now. Her Indian visa expires in February. Rightwing Muslim groups recently threatened to bring life to a standstill in West Bengal if she was not thrown out of the country. What provoked the sudden outburst by the reactionary groups is a mystery. There are rumours that great powers are at work to dislodge the communist government from West Bengal. It is said, for example, that just as Muslim groups were banded together to take on the Russian communists in Kabul, Henry Kissinger, who was in Kolkata last month, prescribed similar methods to evict communists from power there. They had been a thorn in the flesh over the nuclear deal. On its part, the weak-kneed Left Front government, reeling on the backfoot with its culpability in the violence in Nandigram, wasted no time to pack off Ms Nasrin to the BJP-ruled Rajasthan state. Nothing could be more ironical. The spearhead of India’s liberal ideals had dispatched a hapless poet and author to the den of rightwing obscurantism. To add yet one more twist to her sad drama, Taslima was soon escorted from BJP-ruled Jaipur to Congress-ruled Delhi.
So, really, none of the three major political parties that claims to swear by India’s fairly liberal rulebook, the constitution, has acquitted itself honourably in the testing battle against obscurantism. The BJP today advocates giving asylum to Taslima Nasrin but it can barely hide its glee at the fact that its goons hounded out celebrated painter M.F. Hussain from his own country. Hussain, 92, faces arrest in Gujarat, his home state, over alleged desecration of Hindu sentiments in his drawings. Hindu groups have issued threats to lynch him. To show their clout they had raided an arts college in Gujarat over similar allegations.
The Congress has not fared any better. Even before Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini came into the frame, Rajiv Gandhi had banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Later when a group of Muslim intellectuals met Rajiv Gandhi to ask him not to overturn the Supreme Court’s verdict in favour of a Muslim divorcee in the notorious Shahbano case, he smiled and gave them tea and biscuits. He was always happy to meet liberal Muslims, he confessed, but he could not do anything because the Muslim Personal Law Board would be offended. It needs to be recorded that the board is not the creature of the Indian constitution but derives its strength from an administrative order passed during the Indira Gandhi period. And now the Left Front has dispatched Taslima Nasrin to the BJP’s den. Frustrating times all round.
The foreword to the book, “Taslima Nasrin and the issue of feminism”, by the two Chowdhurys was written by Prof Zillur Rahman Siddiqui, the former vice-chancellor of Dhaka’s Jahangirnagar University. “To my mind, more important than Nasrin’s stature as a writer is her role as a rebel which makes her appear as a latter day Nazrul Islam,” he says.
“The rage and the fury turned against her by her irate critics reminds one of a similar onslaught directed against the rebel poet in the twenties. More than half a century separates the two, but the society, despite some advance of the status of women, has not changed much. The forces opposed to change and progress, far from yielding the ground, have still kept their fort secure against progress; have in fact gained in striking power. While Nazrul never had to flee his country, Nasrin was forced to do so.”
Kabir Chowdhury describes in the paper how Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh bayed for her blood. A Sylhet-based group of clerics with the high-sounding nomenclature of Bangladesh Sahaba Sainik Parishad gave a fatwa against her in September 1993 and offered an amount of 50,000 taka for her head. But Nasrin refused to be cowed down. She would not recant or compromise. In fact in her poem ‘Death Sentence’, she wrote about her own cherished dream that people like John Lennonhad once dreamt of. She says:
If I asked for a secular world, would you give me that?
Or, if I wanted all the fences of crop-fields, all barbed-wire boundaries…
All walls between countries to be demolished…
What then?
If I wanted a classless society, no discrimination between men and women…
Would you give me that?
If you do, I will smilingly go to the gallows and hang from the noose.
The demand for her head intensified after her alleged statement that the Quran was in need of revision, though as Kabir Chowdhury observes, “she repeatedly said that the Islamic law known as Shariah should be revised in order to remove the discrimination between male and female, permitted and encouraged under it.” The novel Lajja is not rated as Ms Nasrin’s most outstanding work but it deals with a sensitive issue. The book narrates the condition of a Hindu family in Dhaka after the communal flare-up there following violence in Ayodhya where religious zealots had razed a mosque in December 1992. The young daughter of the family is raped and to its utter frustration and dismay the family finds itself deserted even by its secular Muslim friends. A young liberal Hindu is transformed into a fanatic and a communalist. Suranjan was a leftist and a progressive person who was imbued with the ideals of Bengali nationalism. But when he saw all his ideals crumble around him in a maelstrom of communal frenzy his desperate emotion slowly turned him into a communalist.
Says Chowdhury: “The way this transformation is shown in the novel is psychologically valid and contributes in no mean measure to the aesthetic worth of the work. Suranjan, mauled and battered, angry and vengeful, almost rapes a Muslim whore just to prove that Hindus were also capable of raping.”
Prof Chowdhury quotes a passage from the novel to make his point. “Many told Suranjan – why did you then demolish Babri Masjid? You! Suranjan was amazed to hear it. You are a Hindu. Suranjan in India and Suranjan in Dhaka are one and same. Is India then the real homeland of Suranjan? Has he been an alien in this country from the day of his birth?” Even as he supports Nasrin’s feelings in the novel, Prof Chowdhury seems justified in questioning some of its details. “Nasrin’s novel does not give a total picture of Bangladesh,” he says. “It gives the impression that Bangladesh is a fundamentalist state where most Muslims are communal and Hindu-haters.
Which is not true. On almost every occasion when communal disturbances broke out in Bangladesh many progressive Muslims organised themselves quickly and stood by the side of the oppressed and harassed Hindus against their frenzied coreligionists.”
Prof Chowdhury slams the BJP for seeking to exploit the story of Lajja for its own communal agenda. “Without Nasrin’s permission it arranged a Hindi translation of Lajja which sold like hot cake and gave an incomplete and one-sided picture of the state of things in Bangladesh.
Did Nasrin play into the hands of the BJP? If she did it was certainly not done consciously. She stated very clearly: “I am very pained at what is happening with my book in India. I condemn the politics of the BJP and the Jamaat-i-Islami equally and I haven’t given permission to any fundamentalist mouthpiece to publish the novel’”. It is a shame that the current debate about Taslima Nasrin tends to be ill informed, even prejudiced, because her ideas do not in with the agenda of the main political groups here.
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