Driven out of Kolkata by violent protests last week, Taslima Nasrin talks to Kathleen McCaul from hiding about her battle for free expression
Friday November 30, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Writers lives are proverbially quiet, but Taslima Nasrin's is a frighteningly noisy one. Last week in Kolkata, where the Bangladeshi author has been living since 2004, Muslim groups who claimed she had insulted Islam demonstrated to demand she leave India. Hundreds took to the streets and violence flared.
"There was burning going on and I was terrified. The two policemen who were supposed to be guarding my door had gone. People said I would be killed by Islamic fundamentalists, the mob would come and attack my house," Nasrin says, her voice shaky as she speaks from a safe house near Delhi.
It's not the first time public feeling about her writing has forced her to flee. Angry, atheistic, and sexually explicit, her work has long been the source of fierce controversy. In 1994, she slipped out of Bangladesh after her books' vehement attacks on the position of women in Islamic societies led to charges of blasphemy. She then spent a decade in Sweden where, she has said, she felt "condemned to life as an outsider". Her novels, poetry and journalism have been translated from Bengali into 20 languages but life as an insider, it seems, remains a distant hope.
Nasrin was born in 1962 into a devout Muslim family. Her own experience of sexual abuse and her work as a gynaecologist in Bangladesh - where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped - informs her angry writing about the treatment of women in Islam and against religion in general. Her most famous novel, Lajja (Shame), focused on state-sponsored persecution and violence against Bangladesh's Hindu minority and sparked off protests which led to the proceedings against her. Her four volumes of sexually explicit memoirs - still banned in Bangladesh - and outspoken newspaper articles have also fuelled her notoriety.
She subsequently became a standard-bearer for freedom of speech and was written about admiringly in the New Yorker and Time. She remembers how every country wanted to give her shelter: she was viewed as a status symbol of democracy. But she wanted to go home. She tried again and again before finally settling three years ago in the Indian state of West Bengal, which, together with modern day Bangladesh, made up the old pre-partition state of Bengal.
"I want to live in Kolkata, I don't want to live in Europe, I can't write there," she said. "I write in Bengali and I need to be surrounded by the Bengali language and culture." For two years it seemed she might have found a home there, but last week's events - which saw 50 people injured and a curfew imposed - have put paid to that dream.
She first travelled under the cover of a burqa to the western Indian state of Rajasthan, thousands of miles away from West Bengal, but the police there said they couldn't provide her with adequate security. She was moved to Delhi in a convoy of cars, chased by media who picked up grainy images of her in the back of an official car being whisked away.
Nasrin's critics say she is intentionally outrageous and should have seen this coming. Earlier in the year an Islamic group offered a reward for her beheading and protesters - including local politicians - ransacked a book launch in Tamil Nadu for her novel Shodh (Getting Even).
"This is a culmination of the offence her writing has caused over the years, " said Dr Alum Mansoor, general secretary of All India Milli Council, one of the groups which has been protesting against Nasrin.
Nasrin first enraged clerics with a series of Bangladeshi newspaper columns which criticised the treatment of women under Islam; describing in one article the execution of a 21-year-old woman by burying her waist-deep in a pit and then stoning her because her marriage was deemed un-Islamic.
But all this was over 10 years ago, and Nasrin thinks the timing of this flare-up of violence is very suspicious. In recent years she has been directing her frank prose not towards Muslim fundamentalists but at Calcutta's literary circles, with kiss-and-tell autobiographies describing, in detail, sexual encounters with prominent Bengali poets. (She caused one furore when she claimed that one renowned poet was having an affair with his sister-in-law.)
"I'm writing a lot, but not about Islam," she explains. "It's not my subject now. This is about politics. In the last three months I have been put under severe pressure to leave Bengal by the police."
Even Muslim figures such as Dr Mansoor think she is being used by the West Bengal government as a way of diverting attention from an altogether different scandal - the dispute between the state and Muslim farmers in the rural district of Nandigram. When the government tried to take over Nandigram to turn it into an industrial hub, the farmers fought back. Fourteen people were killed in one encounter and reports of ongoing violence have continued to shock India.
At a candle-lit vigil for Nasrin in Delhi on Tuesday, her defenders were passionate in her defence. "There has been disquiet over the number of Muslim deaths in Nandigram and who is the obvious symbol of disquiet in West Bengal? Taslima. She is an easy target. Some extremely political moves are being made in the state and she is being caught in the crossfire despite not opening her mouth on the issue," said Rita Menon, her publisher, holding a large placard in the growing dark.
Nasrin says that her treatment has nothing to do with Nandigram and is unusually quiet on the subject. But with the state in such turmoil, a quiet return to Kolkata for Nasrin looks unlikely. Menon is bleak.
"We do worry. I have no idea what will happen. She can go anywhere but she needs a particular environment in which to write - a place where she can speak to language and she has a cultural context in which to write," she said.
Nasrin, meanwhile, describes herself as "traumatised". "This has upset me so much," she says. "I can't think of anything else. I write from the heart. I see the truth and I want to tell the truth. We can't let the fundamentalists win."
The Indian media, government and literary establishment have come out to support Nasrin - in front page news, TV headlines and major editorials - despite the criticism of her work in recent years. She has become the latest symbol of the fight for freedom of expression in a country fraught with communal tensions. Whether she will win her own fight, for a voice and a home, remains uncertain.
|
