Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen returned to Kolkata on Friday after nearly 19 years, describing the visit as an emotional homecoming to a city she still considers her own.
Her return, ahead of an anti-fundamentalism literary programme on Saturday, also carries political significance as it comes months after the BJP formed the government in Bengal and amid renewed debate over freedom of expression and secularism.
With folded hands, Nasreen greeted those waiting to receive her at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport and said, “I am feeling very good to be back.” The visit marks her first trip to Kolkata since November 2007 when she was forced to leave the city following violent protests over her writings.
The author is scheduled to make her first public appearance in Kolkata since 2007 at a literary event at Rabindra Sadan, where she is expected to recite poetry. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari and noted author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay are among those expected to attend the event.
Ahead of her visit, Nasreen had said that returning to Kolkata felt like coming back to “my own country”. “I feel as though I am returning to my own country. Bengal has never been divided in my heart by a border or a barbed-wire fence. The door to the eastern part of Bengal remains closed to me, so for now, this part of Bengal is my home,” she had said.
Nasreen said she was returning “with joy, but also with pain”, recalling that Kolkata had given her a home, friends, readers and a sense of belonging before she was forced to leave. “I never left Kolkata willingly; the then West Bengal government forced me to leave the state. Yet I never stopped hoping that one day I would return,” she had said.
Describing the visit as more than a personal homecoming, Nasreen said it symbolised the return of a voice that religious fundamentalists had once tried to silence and reaffirmed the importance of freedom of expression.
She also thanked the organisers and the present West Bengal government for facilitating her visit and providing security, while asserting that the protection of a writer’s freedom should not depend on the ideology of any government or the approval of any religious group, but must be safeguarded as a fundamental right.
Nasreen’s return revives one of the most debated chapters in West Bengal’s contemporary political and cultural history. After fleeing Bangladesh in 1994 following death threats over her novel “Lajja”, she settled in Kolkata in 2004, embracing the Bengali-speaking city as her cultural refuge in exile.
Her association with the city ended abruptly in November 2007 after violent protests over portions of her memoir “Dwikhandito”, which had already been banned by the then Left Front government in 2003 for allegedly hurting the sentiments of sections of the Muslim community.
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