TASLIMA

Split: A Life by Taslima Nasrin; Published by  Penguin Random House; Pages 496 ; Price Rs.599.

                                                                                                          ***********************************************************                                       Taslima Nasrin has become a world famous personality  and symbol because of the repression to which she has been subjected in her native land-Bangla Desh and elsewhere.

                 “Dwikhanditho (split into two),” is the original Bengali version of Nazrin’s “Split”, which was banned by the West Bengal government in 2003 for being incendiary. A High Court order in 2005 overturned that ruling, but by then Nasrin, who had already had to flee Bangladesh in 1994, had been pushed out of Kolkata too.

Somewhere in the middle of this book,--Page 53- comes a blank page with a small paragraph which resembles an epitaph on a large tombstone. “Note,” it says: “Despite the injunction being revoked, persistent concerns over renewed communal tensions have forced the author to excise the section from further Bengali publications and leave a blank page in its stead.”

That blank page and note  tells  as much of Nasrin’s life as this book under review which is only one of her seven volumes of  memoirs. The book runs through much of her years ---growing up in Mymensingh and then moving to Dhaka to practise medicine. It reveals  many of the loves of her life, but also her betrayal at the hands of her father, who beat her mercilessly on the basis of an article written about her, her alcoholic and abusive second husband, whom she marries on a whim, to the larger world outside that hounded her out of her home, or remained silent instead of moving to protect her.

 The book --- originally banned in West Bengal because of accusations that certain sections might incite communal tensions — sums up the history of the author as well as her evolution from a poet to a public intellectual, covering her work as a novelist, an essayist, a staunch feminist and an activist for freedom of thought and expression. The book  asserts the power of the printed word and the reaction it triggers in those who fear the word.

There are some quirks in the telling of the story. Anecdotes about people appear out of nowhere, without a proper introduction of  characters .  Nasrin’s lovers are nameless and become  initials, R, MM, NM etc., which confuses the reader. The book gives no dates of events.

“Anger” is the dominating element of the tale. Nasrin’s anger over the treatment of women and minorities, at erroneous portrayals by the media, at political compromises of leaders. Her raw anger, that barrels out of her run-on sentences, justifying a description of her — of an “angry young woman pitted against a lot of angry old men.”

Nasrin had been compelled  to get out of  Kolkata, a city she considered her second home after Dhaka, which she had left in 1994. She can return to neither city. Kolkata was not the first time she faced defamation, humiliation and ban—even physical harassment—because of her writings. After Salman Rushdie, Nasrin made Bangladesh join the list of countries in the subcontinent that bowed down to religious fundamentalists at the cost of their artists. She has been in self-exile from her country since she was 32 years old due to a death threat (fatwa) allegedly prompted by her life, feminist writings in newspapers, stand on sexual freedom for women, the novel Lajja (Shame), and events in Bangladesh following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. Since then, Nasrin has lived sporadically in India and Europe for 24 years, and has a home in Delhi under a renewable temporary residence permit.

One is shocked at the horrible treatment Nasrin was subjected to by almost all the men who were important in her life. This happened to her although she was well-read, a practising physician, and a poet, acclaimed for her brave, fresh voice, secular values, and championing of the poor and minorities. Through her years of growing up in Mymensingh, work and personal life in Dhaka, and the trials and tribulations that followed, she depicts how she tried to live a honest and true life, not as a woman but as a human, advocating for women and not against anyone, which still meant going against religion and society.

 As a person, a poet and a writer, Nasrin is noted for  challenging the established order. She has challenged  cultural and social mores and expanded the space where women’s sexuality can be freely explored, in words, through memory in the form of poetry or prose. 

 The politics of language – the Mother Tongue — brought Bangladesh into being. Its intellectuals, poets and singers have had extraordinary impact in shaping the course of the 45-year-old country since its sense of being a nation emerged long before 1971, through the language movement (Bhasha Andolan) of 1952, the martyrs of Ekushe February (February 21) and the war of liberation.

When Nasrin asks: “Do nations need a religion?” and provides the answer, “It is the people who need it. The nation is not one individual; it is a guarantor of safety for people of all religious and ethnic identities,” she is speaking a truth on power and on behalf of every person who has feared or died or has been assaulted by the self-appointed defenders of faith — Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or Christian.

By calling religion “a fatal virus that had been dispersed in the air” in the context of the intensifying political confrontations in Bangladesh just before President Ershad’s ouster in 1990, Nasrin is speaking for every country where politics has been communalised to serve the narrow ends of political ambition.

Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya welcomed the ban  of the book by the Calcutta High Court as he accepted that progressive and liberal West Bengal could erupt in communal discord over the book.

 The combination of politics and religion, of politics and hate, of politics and culture has transformed the Indian landscape into a battleground where one side gets to call the shots and the other side cowers in fear. It has claimed victims among public intellectuals of extraordinary courage and wide impact, like Gauri Lankesh,  Narendra Dhabolkar and Govind Pansare all of whom challenged the emerging political-religious dogma of the RSS-led Sangh Parivar. They and the  Bangladeshi bloggers Avijit Roy, Rezaul Karim Siddiquee, Niloy Chatterjee, Ahmed Rajib Haider, Ananta Bijoy Das and many others testify to the power of the word to challenge and undermine Nazrin’s beliefs.

The book is an important record of the fate of those who dare to walk the road of truth, the rebels and the revolutionaries who try to change society and right historical wrongs! Through her writing, Nasrin says, “I tried to reaffirm that a woman’s body and her heart were her own and not someone else’s property to treat as they pleased.”

 We have not heard of another Bangladeshi female voice like Nasrin’s. Nor, for that matter, in India. It is, therefore, essential that this voice is not tamed.

 Apart from the personal anecdotes, the scathing commentary on the social and political structure is thought-provoking and attempts to ask questions that may incite anger and fury for those who may not be able to view it for what it is – a reflection of the world we live in.

                                     

P.P.Ramachandran.

9/9/2018.