Return of the prodigal ! Rebel writer and poet Taslima Nasreen to attend programme in Calcutta on August 1
By Our Correspondent
Agartala, July 15, 2026
The wind of change seems to be blowing faster than usual in Hindu Bengali homeland of West Bengal following the anticipated ignominious debacle suffered by the infamous Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee in early May this year. While the change in the socio-economic and political life of West Bengal , ravaged first by thirty four years of misrule by the left front and fifteen years of anarchy under the Trinamool, is already visible, a virtually non-event seems to have brought to the fore the tectonic shift of power equations in the unfortunate state.
It has been briefly reported in a section of traditional media that dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, long hounded by fundamentalists in her country and forced to seek refuge in India, is returning to Calcutta to attend a cultural progamme in the ‘Rabindra Sadan’ on August 1. The luminaries who will keep her company on the exalted dais are the West Bengal chief minister Shubhendu Adhikary , finance minister and Oxford Phd Dr Swapan Dasgupta and leading literateur Shirshendu Mookherjee . Needless to say , the programme will draw a huge applauding crowd of intellectuals , writers and poets-a crowd that would have shuddered to pronounce Taslima’s name during past regimes dependent on the politics of appeasement.
A doctor by profession, Taslima had earned the ire of her fundamentalist countrymen in Bangladesh with her bold feminism reflected in her once-popular newspaper column ‘Swanirbachita Kalam’. She had graduated to writing novels and stories and poetry soon but it was her incisive critique of Islam , its mysogyny and persecution of minorities , poignantly exposed in her writings, that raised the hackles of self-appointed custodians of the faith in Bangladesh. Her autobiographical works ‘Amar Meyebela’ (My days as a girl), ‘Kaw’, ‘Dwikhondito’ et al antagonized the ‘Momins’ and their guardians in her native country but all hell broke loose as her novel ‘Lajja’ (Shame) came out in 1992, exposing the brutal persecution of Hindu minorities in the wake of the ‘Babri’demolition that year . A huge amount of money had been declared on her head and the ruling BNP government headed by late Begum Khaleda Zia expelled her from the country in early 1993. But Taslima’s life in her favourite city Calcutta was not that easy as fundamentalists on this side of the Radcliffe line also looked for an opportunity to hunt her down . Sensing trouble and threat to a captive vote bank the then left front government had stage-managed an agitation organized by an obscure leader Idris Ali, compelling Taslima to leave Calcutta for Delhi in November 2007.
The poor lady lived for a short while in Delhi and even during that time she narrowly escaped death at the hands of goons and thugs of MIM party in Hyderabad where she had been invited as a guest in a literary programme . After a long and forced sojourn in Norway and France Taslima safely settled in Delhi in 2014 after Modi-led BJP had come to power on a permanent residency certificate . Her long cherished wish to visit Calcutta and interact with the intellectual community there is now all set to be fulfilled. But the newly elected BJP government in West Bengal would need to deploy tight security to protect the hounded lady from any harm as the professional faithfuls and their guardian angels would be tempted to make an attempt on her life and make a spectacle of it for understandable reasons.
more news...