Taslima wrote numerous articles for the
newspapers and magazines all over the world. A very few examples
are here
I Am But A Disembodied Voice,
The Living Dead
What have I done that I can neither cross my own
threshold nor enjoy human company?
Where am I? I am certain no one will
believe me if I say I have no answer to this apparently straightforward question,
but the truth is I just do not know. And if I were to be asked how I am, I
would again answer: I don’t know. I am like the living dead: benumbed;
robbed of the pleasure of existence and experience; unable to move beyond the
claustrophobic confines of my room. Day and night, night and day. Yes, this is
how I have been surviving.
This nightmare did not begin when I was suddenly bundled out
of Calcutta—it
has been going on for a while. It is like a slow and lingering death, like
sipping delicately from a cupful of slow-acting poison that is gradually
killing all my faculties. This is a conspiracy to murder my essence, my being,
once so courageous, so brave, so dynamic, so playful. I realise what is going
on around me but am utterly helpless, despite my best efforts, to wage a battle
on my own behalf. I am merely a disembodied voice. Those who once stood by me
have disappeared into the darkness.
I ask myself: what heinous crime have I committed? What sort
of life is this where I can neither cross my own threshold nor know the joys of
human company? What crime have I committed that I have to spend my life hidden
away, relegated to the shadows? For what crimes am I being punished by this
society, this land? I wrote of my beliefs and my convictions. I used words, not
violence, to express my ideas. I did not take recourse to pelting stones or
bloodshed to make my point. Yet, I am considered a criminal. I am being
persecuted because it was felt that the right of others to express their
opinions was more legitimate than mine.
Does India
not realise how immense the suffering must be for an individual to renounce her
most deeply-held beliefs? How humiliated, frightened, and insecure I must have
been to allow my words to be censored. If I had not agreed to the grotesque
bowdlerisation of my writings by those who insisted on it, I would have been
hounded and pursued till I dropped dead. Their politics, their faith, their
barbarism, and their diabolical purposes are all intent on sucking the
lifeblood out of me, because the truths I write are so difficult for them to
stomach. How can I—a powerless and unprotected individual—battle
brute force? But come what may, I cannot take recourse to untruth.
What have I to offer but love and compassion? In the way
that they used hatred to rip out my words, I would like to use compassion and
love to rip the hatred out of them. Certainly, I am enough of a realist to
acknowledge that strife, hatred, cruelty and barbarism are integral elements of
the human condition. This will not change; and how can an insignificant
creature like me change all this? If I were to be eradicated or exterminated,
it would not matter one whit to the world at large. I know all this. Yet, I had
imagined Bengal would be different. I had
thought the madness of her people was temporary. I had thought that the Bengal I loved so passionately would never forsake me.
She did.
Exiled from Bangladesh,
I wandered around the world for many years like a lost orphan. The moment I was
given shelter in West Bengal, it felt as though
all those years of numbing tiredness just melted away. I was able to resume a
normal life in a beloved and familiar land. So long as I survive, I will carry
within me the vistas of Bengal, her sunshine,
her wet earth, her very essence. The same Bengal
whose sanctuary I once walked many blood-soaked miles to reach has now turned
its back upon me. I am a Bengali within and without; I live, breathe, and dream
in Bengali. I find it hard to believe that I am no longer wanted in Bengal.
I am a guest in this land, I must be careful of what I say.I
must do nothing that violates the code of hospitality. I did not come here to
hurt anyone’s sentiments or feelings. Wounded and hurt in my own country,
I suffered slights and injuries in many lands before I reached India,
where I knew I would be hurt yet again. For this is, after all, a democratic
and secular land where the politics of the votebank imply that being secular is
equated with being pro-Muslim fundamentalist. I do not wish to believe all
this. I do not wish to hear all this. Yet, all around me I read, hear, and see
evidence of this. I sometimes wish I could be like those mythical monkeys,
oblivious to all the evil that is going on around me. Death who visits me in
many forms now feels like a friend. I feel like talking to him, unburdening
myself to him. I have no one else to speak to, no one else to whom I can
unburden myself.
I have lost my beloved Bengal.
No child torn from its mother’s breast could have suffered as much as I
did during that painful parting. Once again, I have lost the mother from whose
womb I was born. The pain is no less than the day I lost my biological mother.
My mother had always wanted me to return home. That was something I could not
do. After settling down in Calcutta,
I was able to tell my mother, who by then was a memory within me, that I had
indeed returned home. How did it matter which side of an artificial divide I
was on? Now, I do not have the courage to tell my mother that I have been
unceremoniously expelled by those who had once given me shelter, that my life
now is that of a nomad. My sensitive mother would be shattered if I were to
tell her all this. Instead, I have now taken to convincing myself that I must
have transgressed somewhere, committed some grievous error. Why else would I be
in such a situation? Is daring to utter the truth a terrible sin in this era of
falsehood and deceit? Is it because I am a woman?
I know I have not been condemned by the masses. If their
opinion had been sought, I am certain the majority would have wanted me to stay
on in Bengal. But when has a democracy
reflected the voice of the masses? A democracy is run by those who hold the
reins of power, who do exactly what they think fit. An insignificant
individual, I must now live life on my own terms and write about what I believe
in and hold dear. It is not my desire to harm, malign, or deceive. I do not
lie. I try not to be offensive. I am but a simple writer who neither knows nor
understands the dynamics of politics. The way in which I was turned into a
political pawn, however, and treated at the hands of base politicians, beggars
belief. For what end, you may well ask. A few measly votes. The force of
fundamentalism, which I have opposed and fought for many years, has only been
strengthened by my defeat.
This is my beloved India, where I have been living and
writing on secular humanism, human rights and emancipation of women. This is
also the land where I have had to suffer and pay the price for my most deeply
held and fundamental convictions, where not a single political party of any
persuasion has spoken out in my favour, where no non-governmental organisation,
women’s rights or human rights group has stood by me or condemned the
vicious attacks launched upon me. This is an India I have never before known.
Yes, it is true that individuals in a scattered, unorganised manner are
fighting for my cause, and journalists, writers, and intellectuals have spoken
out in my favour, even if they have never read a word I have written. Yet, I am
grateful for their opinions and support.
Wherever individuals gather in groups, they seem to lose
their power to speak out. Frankly, this facet of the new India terrifies me. Then again, is
this a new India,
or is it the true face of the nation? I do not know.Since my earliest childhood
I have regarded India
as a great land and a fearless nation. The land of my dreams: enlightened,
strong, progressive, and tolerant. I want to be proud of that India. I will die a happy person
the day I know India
has forsaken darkness for light, bigotry for tolerance. I await that day. I do
not know whether I will survive, but India and what she stands for has
to survive.
Delhi /18 Dec
The Vanishing (
Bengali)
Banished Within and Without
Although I was not born an Indian there is
very little about my appearance, my tastes, my habits and my traditions to
distinguish me from a daughter of the soil.
Had I been born some years earlier than I was, I would have been an
Indian in every sense of the term. My
father was born before partition; the strange history of this subcontinent made
him a citizen of three states, his daughter a national of two. In a village in what was then East Bengal,
there once lived a farmer by the name of Haradhan Sarkar, one of whose sons,
Komol, probably driven to fury by zamindari oppression, converted to Islam and
became Kamal. I belong to this
family. Haradhan Sarkar was my
great-grandfather’s father.
Haradhan’s other descendents obviously moved to India either during
or after partition and became citizens of this country. My grandfather, a Muslim, did not. When I was a child, the notion of the once
fashionable theory of pan-Islamic had been exploded by East Pakistani Muslims
fighting their West Pakistani coreligionists.
Our struggle was for Bengali nationalism and secularism.
Even though
I was born well after partition, the notion of undivided India held me in thrall. I wrote a number of poems and stories
lamenting the loss of undivided Bengal, indeed undivided India even before I visited this
country. I simply could not bring myself
to accept the bit of barbed wire that kept families and friends apart even
though they shared a common language and culture. What hurt most was that this wire had been
secured by religion. By my early teens I
had forsaken religion and turned towards secular humanism and feminism which
sprang from within me and were in no way artificially imposed. My father, a man with a modern scientific
outlook, encouraged me to introspect and as I grew older I broke away not just
from religion but also from all the traditions and customs, indeed the very
culture, which constantly oppressed, suppressed and denigrated women. When I first visited India, specifically West
Bengal, in 1989, I did not for an instant think I was in a foreign
land. From the moment I set foot on
Indian soil, I knew I belonged here and that it was, in some fundamental way,
inseparable from the land I called my own.
The reason
for this was not my Hindu forebear. The
reason was not that one of India’s
many cultures is my own or that I speak one of her many languages or that I
look Indian. It is because the values
and traditions of India
are embedded deeply within me. These
values and traditions are a manifestation of the history of the
subcontinent. I am a victim of that
history. Then again, I have been
enriched and enlivened by it, if one can call it so. I am a victim of its poverty, colonial
legacy, faiths, communalism, violence, bloodshed, partition, migrations,
exodus, riots, wars and even theories of nationhood.
The
intolerance, fanaticism and bigotry of Islamic fundamentalists forced me to
leave Bangladesh,
herself a victim of the subcontinent’s history. I was forced to go into exile; the doors of
my own country slammed shut on my face for good. Since that moment I sought refuge in India. When I was finally allowed entry, not for an
instant did I think I was in an alien land.
Why did I not think so; especially when every other country in Asia,
Europe and America
felt alien to me? Even after spending
twelve years in Europe I could not think of it
as my home. It took less than a year to
think of India
as my home. Is it because we, India
and I, share a common history? Had East
Bengal remained a province of undivided India would the state have
tolerated an attack on basic human freedoms and values and the call for the
death by hanging of a secular writer by the proponents of fundamentalist Islam
and self-seeking politicians? How would a secular democracy have reacted to
this threat against one of its own? Or
is the burden of defending human and democratic values solely a European or
American concern? The gates of India
remained firmly shut when I needed her shelter the most. The Europeans welcomed me with open
arms. Yet, in Europe
I always considered myself a stranger, an outsider. After twelve long years in exile when I
arrived in India
it felt as though I had been resurrected from some lonely grave. I knew this land, I knew the people, I had
grown up somewhere very similar, almost indistinguishable. I felt the need to
do something for this land and its people.
There was a burning desire within me to see that women become educated and independent,
that they stand up for and demand their rights and
freedom. I wanted my writing to
invigorate and contribute in some way to the empowerment of these women who had
always been oppressed and suppressed.
In the
meanwhile, a few Islamic fundamentalists in
Hyderabad chose to launch a physical attack
upon me. The decision to attack me
was motivated by the desire to gain popularity among the local masses. “A woman by the name of Taslima Nasrin
has launched a vicious attack upon Islam and is all set to destroy the tenets
of the faith. Therefore, Islam must be
protected from this woman and the only way to do so is to kill her. Her death will bring many rewards: millions
as fatwa bounty in this world, salvation and unparalleled delights in the next.”
This is the manner in which Islamic fundamentalists in secular India are
attempting to entice poor, uneducated, uninformed Muslims while simultaneously
looking to solidify their vote bank within the community. After hearing of the incident in
Hyderabad, fundamentalist leaders in West
Bengal, where I live, became so excited that they wasted no time
in issuing fatwas against me and calling for my head. Students from madrasas who did not even know
of my existence joined the fray. They knew of my blasphemy without having read
a single one of my books. How did they
know? Because their leaders had assured
them that I had made it my mission to destroy Islam. Therefore, it was their individual and
collective responsibility to protect and preserve their faith. Can one find a more perfect example of brainwashing? While their knowledge of my work may be
infinitesimal, their knowledge of Islam is equally so and they have turned
their faith into a commodity for their own base ends. Almost twenty per cent of India’s
population is Muslim and, unfortunately, the most vocal representatives of this
considerable community are fundamentalists.
Educated, civilized, cultured and secular people from the Muslim
community are not regarded as
representative of the community . What
can be a greater tragedy than this?
A greater
tragedy, arguably, is that I may have to endure in progressive India, indeed in West Bengal, what I had to
endure in Bangladesh. I live practically under house arrest. No public place is allegedly safe for me any
longer. Not even the homes of friends
are above suspicion, nothing is above suspicion. Even stepping out for a walk is considered
unsafe. It is felt that I should spend
my days in a poorly lit room grappling with shadows.
Those who
threaten to kill me are allowed by the state to spew their venom. They have tacitly been given the rights to do
whatever they desire from disturbing the peace with their demonstrations to
terrorizing the common man in the name of their faith. Those that oppose them and their unholy brand
of communalism, those who take a stance against injustice and untruth are
silenced in invidious ways. I am warned
both implicitly and explicitly that, for example, a fundamentalists’
demonstration is about to take place and it would be best for all concerned if
I quietly left the city. Of course, do
return by all means, but only when the situation has calmed down, I am
advised. But will the situation ever
calm down? For the last thirteen years I
have been waiting for the situation to calm down. I was told the same thing when I left Bangladesh
to go into exile. I refuse to leave
because to leave would be to accept defeat and hand the fundamentalists the
victory they have always desired. It
would spell defeat for the freedom of expression, independence of thought,
democracy and secularism. I simply
refuse to allow them this victory. If
they are eventually victorious, the loss will be as much mine as India’s. If India gives in to the
fundamentalists’ demand to deport me, the list of demands will become an
endless one. A deportation today, a ban
tomorrow, an execution the day after.
Where will it cease? They will
pursue their agenda with boundless enthusiasm knowing that victory is
certain. And, of course, the secular
state and its secular custodians will bow down to every fundamentalist’s
every whim and fancy. Giving in to their
demands is not a solution and any attempt to appease them makes them even more
dangerous and pernicious.
Even in my
worst nightmares I had not imagined that I would be persecuted in India as I was in Bangladesh. Persecuted by the majority in one and a
minority in another, but persecuted just the same. The bigotry, the intolerance, the death
threats, the terrors: all the same. I
often wonder what good it would do them to kill me. The fundamentalists are very well aware that
it may bring them some benefit but will do nothing for the cause of Islam. Islam will remain as it has always remained. Neither I nor any other individual has the
ability to destabilize Islam. The face
of fundamentalism, its language and its intentions are the same the world over:
to grab civilization by the scruff of its neck and drag it back a few millennia
kicking and screaming.
My world is
gradually shrinking. I, who once roamed
the streets without a care in the world, am now shackled. Always outspoken, I
am now silenced, unable to demonstrate, left without the means of protesting
for what I hold dear. Film festivals,
concerts and plays all continue around me but I cannot participate. I spend my existence surrounded by walls: a
prisoner. But I refuse to acknowledge this as my destiny. I still believe that one day I will be able
to resume the life I once enjoyed. I
still believe that India,
unlike Bangladesh,
will triumph over fundamentalism. I still
believe that I will find shelter and solace here. The love and affection of
Indians is my true shelter and solace. I
still believe I will be able to spend the rest of my life here free of cares
and worries. I love this country. I treat this land as my own. If I were to be ejected from this country it
would amount to the cold-blooded murder of my most cherished ideals, perhaps a
fate far worse than I could meet at the hands of any fundamentalist.
I have
nowhere to go, no country or home to return to.
India is my country, India
is my home. How much more will I have to
endure at the hands of fundamentalists and their vote-grabbing political allies
for the cardinal sin of daring to articulate the truth? If the subcontinent turns its back on me I have
nowhere to go, no means to survive.
Even after all that has happened, I still believe, I still dream, that
for a sincere, honest, secular writer, India is the safest refuge, the
only refuge.
Kolkata/18 Nov
It Feels, Speaks, Smells like Home Outlook,
May 14,2007
No
Woman No Cry, Mint, May 4, 2007
Book Review A long journey to be herself Outlook,
April 2,2007
Lets think of it Outlook, January
22,2007
Book Review: I
Say, Three Cheers for Ayaan Outlook, 28 August,2006( English)
Film Review: who has
the guts to be nasty? Anandabazar Patrika 22 April,2006(Bengali)
Film Review: If they
could show some SEX..would have been better Anandabazar Patrika
18 March, 2006(Bengali)
Film Review: OPURNAYON Desh 2 March,2006 (Bengfali)
Film Review: We women decorate
ourselves and wait for men so that they can enjoy us ABP 23
April,2005
(Bengali)
Review: Poetry Recitation Program
Desh 2March,2006(Bengali)
BOOK REVIEW : 'Right'
for men, 'responsibility' for women Boier Desh October2005
(Bengali)
BOOK REVIEW : I call her the
black-beauty Boier Desh July2005 (Bengali)
BOOK REVIEW: Big fellows Boier
Desh May2005 (Bengali)
I am waiting for a change
Banglar Mukh
April 2006 (Bengali)
Life March 2006(Bengali)
SUNDORI Anondolok, March, 2006(Bengali)
Sandipan February 2006(Bengali)
Two drops of tears, one is meghna, another is jamuna ABP 29March,2005 (Bengali)
I
have no connection with any god, any religion, any sect. The
Times of India
20February,2005 (English)
You
are banned, you must not speak ABP 6February,2005
(Bengali) (original)
Small
things Sangbad
Pratidin 6 february,2005 (Bengali)
Bengali Men October,2004(Bengali)
AN OPEN LETTER
TO ELFRIEDE JELINEK ABP 14October,2004
(Bengali)
Criticism
of religious festival in India where millions of people live below the
poverty line ABP 3 october,2004
(Bengali)
O Naipaul, whatever you say.. ABP
26September,2004 (Bengali) 
Beware
of Dogma ABP 18 September,2004
( Bengali) (uncensored version)
The
Past is not another country
June,2004 (English)
Taslima's Love for Bengali
language and culture.
Link 1
29 March 2004
Link 2
4 April 2004
ABP (Bengali)
O kolkata book
fair Ananda Bazar Patrika(ABP)1 February,2004(Bengali)
HOMELESS EVERYWHERE Sarai Reader2004 crisis/media (English)
...One of the main reasons for the controversy
regarding Dwikhandio is sexual freedom. Since most people are
immersed neck-deep in the traditions of a patriarchal society, they are irritated,
angry and outraged at the open declaration of a woman's sexual autonomy. This
freedom is not something that I simply talk about; rather, I have established
it for myself, in and through my life. But this freedom is not license; men
cannot touch me whenever they please. I decide...
This is Taslima's answer to those who
blame her for writing her book, Dwikhandito. Click here to
read the article. DESH 17December2003
(Bengali)
''I HAVE
NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF'' Taslima's confession
More confession
THE TELEGRAPH December 2003 (English)
Critisicm
of Islam Il faut critiquer l'Islam LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR Semaine du jeudi 19 septembre
2002 (French)
This only proves
religion is the best way to fool the poor, THE TIMES OF INDIA 27august,2002 (English)
Aucun
doute: les Etats-Unis sont une menace pour la paix dans rfi2002 (French)
No Progress is possible without a secular
society Unesco Courier, June 2000 (English)
Ending
silence Time: 100 Time Magazine 23-30 August,1999(English)
A Disobedient woman April,
1997(English)
Briser les chaînes de
la religion (French)
women and cattle
(English)
