A terse note on page 53 – The book was 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. Split: A Life by Taslima Nasrin is a collection of her multi volume autobiographical writings. In its materiality it asserts the power of the printed word and the reaction it triggers in those who fear the word.
About Nasrin and her books, there is not a lot that can be said anew. About the politics that shaped her life and continues to define her, there is much to consider. As a person, a poet and a writer, Nasrin’s most consistent characteristic is that of challenging the established order. If not a willful disrupter, she has certainly upended 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 in prose. But that is to limit who Nasrin is and where she can be situated.
Her journey of confrontation with the state — its power to coerce and indeed its power to transform the country by establishing an “official” religion — captures the reaction and the changes that occur when the individual with her beliefs is compelled to toe a line, diminishing her freedom and bringing her under the surveillance of the clergy and the state, polluting and politicising her faith. This is also the journey of others whose work is with the word, teachers, scholars, musicians and writers of poetry, prose and essays.
The power of the word — as poetry, as song, as book or as messages on social media or as blogs — has moved tens of thousands to take to the streets, to join in protests that have brought down regimes, change governments and amend the laws. 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 the power of the word is pitted against power, of the state, of political ideology, of politicking, of religion, of narrow interpretations of nation and nationalist identity, then the resulting implosion has terrifying destructive impact. 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 to 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.
When Nasrin describes the Eighth Amendment to the Bangladesh Constitution as a “poisonous clause” (The state religion of the Republic is Islam but other religions may be practised in peace and harmony in the Republic) she is speaking up for every citizen in every country where religion is being used to create divisions and turn minorities into second class citizens. The parallels between Islamisation of Bangladesh’s politics that others have deplored as “it stands in contradiction to the consciousness and the ideals of the struggle for independence” and the Sangh Parivar’s interpretation of Hindutva and nationalism that brands and excludes everyone who is not for it as against it and therefore an anti-nationalist cannot be ignored.
The book is also a reminder that the fatal virus has spread and embedded itself across the border in West Bengal where Nasrin, once a cherished exile, is no longer welcome and her book Dwikhandita (Split) was banned by the West Bengal Government in 2003 for fear that it could incite “enmity between different groups on grounds of religion”. Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya, in fact, welcomed the ban by the Calcutta High Court as he accepted that progressive and liberal West Bengal could erupt in communal discord over the book. Nasrin, exiled from Bangladesh in 1993, had found a home in Kolkata till 2007 when a riot like situation unnerved the state government and the Army was called in to maintain law and order.
Hate, fear and exile are experiences that Nasrin shares with hundreds of Indians who are now sheltering away from their homes as vigilantes in the name of defending religious practice have turned them into refugees. 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 is transforming universities, as in Bangladesh, into institutions where the new generation of vigilantes will be nurtured. 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 Nasrin’s fatal virus.
Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist in Kolkata
