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What is the story about?
When Taslima Nasreen stepped off her flight at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport on Friday (July 31), the moment carried the weight of 19 years. She told reporters simply that she was enjoying being back.
A small, plain sentence for a homecoming that had been deferred, postponed, and nearly abandoned more than once.
The Bangladeshi writer, physician, and feminist activist had not set foot in the city since 2007, when protests over her book 'Dwikhondito' forced her out.
Now 63, living in Delhi on a long-term residence permit, she had finally been allowed to come back, this time to attend a programme at Rabindra Sadan protesting religious fundamentalism, which organisers said was also likely to be attended by West Bengal's Chief Minister and a well-known author.
A Doctor Who Became a Writer
Nasreen was born in 1962 in what was then East Pakistan, the daughter of a physician who taught medical jurisprudence.
She followed her father into medicine, training at Mymensingh Medical College and earning her degree in 1984.
As a young doctor, she worked in a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, then in the gynaecology department of Mitford Hospital and the anaesthesia department of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
It was there, treating rape survivors and hearing mothers weep when their newborns turned out to be girls, that something in her began to shift.
Raised Muslim, she drifted toward atheism, her medical work sharpened into a feminist critique that would define everything she wrote afterwards.
She had actually started writing much earlier than that: poetry, from the age of thirteen, and a college literary magazine she edited herself.
Her first poetry collection came out in 1986, and through the late 1980s she built a following as a newspaper columnist, unsettling Bangladesh's conservative establishment with blunt commentary on religion and women's lives. By the early 1990s she had turned to fiction, publishing several novels before the book that would upend her life entirely.
Lajja and the Fatwa
'Lajja' ("Shame"), published in 1993, told of a Hindu family in Bangladesh driven from their home by Muslim mobs. It sold fifty thousand copies in six months before the government banned it.
The backlash was ferocious. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated calling for her execution, and a militant group put a bounty on her life.
A 1994 newspaper interview, in which she was quoted (she says inaccurately) calling for changes to the Quran, made things worse. A splinter faction threatened to release poisonous snakes in Dhaka unless she was killed.
She spent two months in hiding before escaping to Sweden at the end of 1994, and her medical career was over. She would never obtain another Bangladeshi passport to visit her parents. Both are now deceased.
Ten Years of Exile, Then Kolkata
For the next decade, Nasreen lived across Western Europe and North America, writing under the protection of Swedish citizenship.
In 2004, India granted her a renewable residence permit, and she moved to Kolkata, a city she would later say she thought of as home, sharing as it does a language and culture with the Bangladesh she'd fled. For three years she wrote columns for Bengali papers, seemingly settled.
It didn't last. Local opposition kept resurfacing, an imam publicly offered money to anyone who humiliated her, and in 2007, after she was attacked in Hyderabad while promoting a Telugu translation of her work, protests erupted back in Kolkata. A fatwa was revived. A demonstration by a minority-rights group turned into citywide chaos serious enough that the army was called in.
The Indian government moved her to an undisclosed location in Delhi, where she was effectively held under house arrest for more than seven months, declining, at one point, to travel to Paris to accept an award because she didn't want to leave India while fighting for her right to stay in it.
She described the isolation of that period as an unbearable, silent kind of loneliness. By March 2008, she was forced to leave the country altogether.
She resettled in Sweden, later worked at New York University, and in 2015, facing fresh death threats from Al-Qaeda-linked extremists, was helped to relocate to the United States by the Center for Inquiry.
Eventually she returned to India again, but West Bengal's government would not let her back into the state. She was confined to Delhi, her visa extended a year at a time, most recently in 2016, while a request for permanent residency sat, undecided, at the Home Ministry.
The Writer Underneath the Headlines
It would be easy, given the controversies that have trailed her, to lose sight of the writer who started all this: someone who has published more than thirty books of poetry, essays, novels, short stories, and memoir, translated into twenty languages, and who has spent four decades arguing, at real personal cost, that women's bodies and women's stories belong to women.
She's collected an unusually long list of honours for it — the Sakharov Prize, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize, honorary doctorates across Europe — even as four of the seven published instalments of her autobiography have been banned, censored, or fought over in court.
A small, plain sentence for a homecoming that had been deferred, postponed, and nearly abandoned more than once.
The Bangladeshi writer, physician, and feminist activist had not set foot in the city since 2007, when protests over her book 'Dwikhondito' forced her out.
Now 63, living in Delhi on a long-term residence permit, she had finally been allowed to come back, this time to attend a programme at Rabindra Sadan protesting religious fundamentalism, which organisers said was also likely to be attended by West Bengal's Chief Minister and a well-known author.
A Doctor Who Became a Writer
Nasreen was born in 1962 in what was then East Pakistan, the daughter of a physician who taught medical jurisprudence.
She followed her father into medicine, training at Mymensingh Medical College and earning her degree in 1984.
As a young doctor, she worked in a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, then in the gynaecology department of Mitford Hospital and the anaesthesia department of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
It was there, treating rape survivors and hearing mothers weep when their newborns turned out to be girls, that something in her began to shift.
Raised Muslim, she drifted toward atheism, her medical work sharpened into a feminist critique that would define everything she wrote afterwards.
She had actually started writing much earlier than that: poetry, from the age of thirteen, and a college literary magazine she edited herself.
Her first poetry collection came out in 1986, and through the late 1980s she built a following as a newspaper columnist, unsettling Bangladesh's conservative establishment with blunt commentary on religion and women's lives. By the early 1990s she had turned to fiction, publishing several novels before the book that would upend her life entirely.
Lajja and the Fatwa
'Lajja' ("Shame"), published in 1993, told of a Hindu family in Bangladesh driven from their home by Muslim mobs. It sold fifty thousand copies in six months before the government banned it.
The backlash was ferocious. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated calling for her execution, and a militant group put a bounty on her life.
A 1994 newspaper interview, in which she was quoted (she says inaccurately) calling for changes to the Quran, made things worse. A splinter faction threatened to release poisonous snakes in Dhaka unless she was killed.
She spent two months in hiding before escaping to Sweden at the end of 1994, and her medical career was over. She would never obtain another Bangladeshi passport to visit her parents. Both are now deceased.
Ten Years of Exile, Then Kolkata
For the next decade, Nasreen lived across Western Europe and North America, writing under the protection of Swedish citizenship.
In 2004, India granted her a renewable residence permit, and she moved to Kolkata, a city she would later say she thought of as home, sharing as it does a language and culture with the Bangladesh she'd fled. For three years she wrote columns for Bengali papers, seemingly settled.
It didn't last. Local opposition kept resurfacing, an imam publicly offered money to anyone who humiliated her, and in 2007, after she was attacked in Hyderabad while promoting a Telugu translation of her work, protests erupted back in Kolkata. A fatwa was revived. A demonstration by a minority-rights group turned into citywide chaos serious enough that the army was called in.
The Indian government moved her to an undisclosed location in Delhi, where she was effectively held under house arrest for more than seven months, declining, at one point, to travel to Paris to accept an award because she didn't want to leave India while fighting for her right to stay in it.
She described the isolation of that period as an unbearable, silent kind of loneliness. By March 2008, she was forced to leave the country altogether.
She resettled in Sweden, later worked at New York University, and in 2015, facing fresh death threats from Al-Qaeda-linked extremists, was helped to relocate to the United States by the Center for Inquiry.
Eventually she returned to India again, but West Bengal's government would not let her back into the state. She was confined to Delhi, her visa extended a year at a time, most recently in 2016, while a request for permanent residency sat, undecided, at the Home Ministry.
The Writer Underneath the Headlines
It would be easy, given the controversies that have trailed her, to lose sight of the writer who started all this: someone who has published more than thirty books of poetry, essays, novels, short stories, and memoir, translated into twenty languages, and who has spent four decades arguing, at real personal cost, that women's bodies and women's stories belong to women.
She's collected an unusually long list of honours for it — the Sakharov Prize, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize, honorary doctorates across Europe — even as four of the seven published instalments of her autobiography have been banned, censored, or fought over in court.
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