Split

by Taslima Nasrin

  Although I did receive some bouquets for the book, what I mostly received were brickbats. And there was no end to that list. I was causing harm to the Muslim community, I was a traitor to my own people, there was no communalism in Bangladesh so whatever I had written was untrue, the Hindus were responsible for their own condition, they ran to India at the slightest provocation, I had no sense and I was a puppet of the Hindus, I had been awarded by Hindu fundamentalists, they were the ones who had made me write Lajja—and so on and so forth. Of course, this was understandable when coming from fundamentalists. But when liberal intellectuals chimed in too—one of them called Lajja ‘trashy and low-class’ and expressed serious concerns that the novel was going to cause much harm to his Muslim brethren in India while a colleague of his accused me of dishonest reiterations and writing with only the market in my mind—there was hardly anything left to say.

  Despite the attack from all sides the only thing that brought a measure of relief was the fact that many writers protested the ban imposed on the book. I had never met Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury. He lived in London and wrote his columns from there. He once wrote a column for Bhorer Kagaj titled ‘Not her work, her point-of-view, or her opinions, but the person Taslima has become an object of critique’, touching upon my life, the Ananda Puraskar and the controversy around Lajja.

  . . . what has started in the name of a debate around her work is not a debate at all, but an Inquisition. Her self-proclaimed Inquisitors are vicious and murderous fundamentalists who are being egged on by the government in turn. Our secular and progressive intellectuals who are the jury at this trial are themselves conflicted and confused. Some of their writings reveal their not-so-subtle personal vendetta against her, or their unspoken outrage at having been passed over for the Ananda Puraskar in favour of her; for others this is a cunning attempt to undermine her in order to show themselves up in better light . . . The Anandabazar Patrika is not a communal mouthpiece, its scope concerns both democratic as well as commercial. Being a government institution that is a beneficiary of the government of Bangladesh it was perfectly justified that the Bangla Academy of Dhaka had turned down an honour conferred on them by a private publishing house. But it is foolish to expect all writers and artists in Dhaka should do the same. One can accuse the awarding of the Ananda Puraskar of partiality, but it is most definitely not communal. Taslima’s Nirbachito Kolam has critical evaluations of both Hinduism and Islam when it comes to questions of women’s rights and honour. The Ananda Puraskar has perhaps awarded the book’s brave stance against communal bias, and not simply its literary merit.

  The sort of literature that wishes to drive forward a movement, an amendment or a revolution does not always possess a conventional literary artistry that everyone aspires for. The Nazim Hiqmet or Vladimir Mayakovsky that we celebrate today, does much of their political poetry contain exceptional literary merit? Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja is a brave, topical and relevant work reflecting on a particular moment in Bangladesh. How do our intellectuals expect the extant conventions of a traditional work of literature in it? How is it Taslima’s fault that the BJP has picked up the novel for their political campaigning? Recently I managed to get my hands on one of the BJP’s publicity booklets in London, titled ‘Minority Repression in Bangladesh’. It contained nothing that could be attributed to the BJP. All it had was twenty-five news reports of various lengths on repression of minorities and demolition of temples in Bangladesh, culled from daily newspapers of Dhaka and Chattagram and reprinted verbatim. One of the source newspapers is Maulana Mannan’s Inquilab. So should one assume that all these newspapers are mouthpieces for the BJP or the party has paid them handsomely for printing such news?

  A collection called Glaani (Disgrace) was published from Chattagram in August 1992, comprising a few images from the communal violence in 1990, pictures of demolished temples and some information on the torture of Hindu minorities by Muslim fundamentalists. The government had banned the collection, just like it banned my book. Selina Hossain wrote about the bans placed on the two books:

  In the case of both books it has been said that they will incite communal tensions among the readers so the best recourse is to remove both books completely from the public eye. It is as if the nation’s unstable communal situation will become immediately normalized if the two books are hidden away from the public eye.

  The slogan for the National Poetry Festival 1989 was a call for poetry against communal politics. The declaration stated that we believed poetry was born out of harmony and humanity, and communal identities had no place in it . . . It is the epoch of humanity and secularism. All our lines and verses, every metaphor and every symbol, our poetic imagination and our voice, and all our collections are dedicated to those secular individuals who are going to stand guard as sentinels of humanity against state-sponsored communalism . . . Such a humanist and secular worldview is the true wealth of the people of this landmass.

  Some of my feelings of shame and disgrace about Lajja, and the fact that it was lacking as a novel, were mollified when intellectuals took up the task of writing in favour of it. Dr Muhammad Anisul Haque wrote:

  Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja is a bold instance of dissent against the recently engineered communal violence in our country . . . it is possible the book will raise the hackles of some people in our country; especially the ones who have the most nefarious roles to play in disrupting communal peace are bound to get very upset. What is true is true and trying to suppress the truth does not make it a lie.

  Haque himself came and gave me a copy of Tritiya Dhara where the column was published and on his way out said to me, ‘Today the Serbs are demolishing mosques in Bosnia, so will our zealots go and attack churches next? No, they won’t because the government won’t let them, because if that happens then the British and American imperialists will be displeased.’

  Hasan Firdaus, a fearless journalist, lived in the US and wrote regularly for Bangladeshi newspapers. He wrote:

  Books can’t be strangled to death. But they can be banned and burnt. When the truth that emerges from a book terrorizes the powers that be, they try their utmost to prohibit it . . . Powerful people and their societies have done this since the dawn of time. At least they have tried, but they have not succeeded. They killed Socrates but could they hide the truth he had uttered? Hitler had bonfires of books only to be relegated to the trashcan of history in the end. Lajja is not simply a story of the communal riots of 1992, it is a testimony of the insidious communalism that plagues Bangladesh today.

  Jatin Sarkar wrote a long column in Ajker Kagaj on the ban on Lajja.

  This is a law they have inherited as a legacy of their colonial past. So many people died fighting the colonial state, they sacrificed their honour and their lives to gain independence, and when that independence was threatened by totalitarianism they went and did it all over again in the name of freedom. But in the newly freed country the new powers that were democratically elected used the same laws as used by the despots before them to rule and control the masses. In fact, I should rather say they misused these laws. This is our shame, but the people sitting over our heads as our rulers do not feel any shame at all.

  Shame, hatred, fear are useless investments and our rulers were well versed in the axiom, a fact Sarkar did not fail to point out. Lajja was not the source of my shame, it was an account of our collective disgrace, and Sarkar had no qualms in making such a huge claim. He was clear in his stance that he did not consider Bengalis to be inherently communal.

  Bengalis have made secularism an inextricable component of their national identity by their heroic struggle against the communal state of Pakistan. But just like every other race even among Bengalis there were always these few scurrilous elements, like dark craters on the surface of the moon. These deceitful elements had opposed the Mukti Juddho too and even after the independence they have always been active in devising new ways to embarrass the people.

  I began to deliberate how much of this shame I
had managed to address by writing Lajja. The story I had written was not something people were unaware of. I had written about certain oft-discussed and oft-repeated issues, things I thought of every day, things I spoke about regularly with friends and relatives, protests I was trying to articulate or indignations I was accumulating every day, the dissent that was waiting to burst out of me—only a fraction of these things had found space in Lajja. I knew and so did my progressive friends that the path ahead of us was littered with thorns, but we were doubly aware that if we were to stop the thorns would only pile up and the way would only get more difficult. We had to walk the road less travelled, the one most were afraid to take, and compromises were out of the question. There were clearly two camps: one reactionary and the other progressive. The former wished to push society back by millennia and infest the human mind with blindness, superstition, jealousy, hate and fear. And our democratically elected government was aiding the reactionaries in their project. Although their hands were full of money and weapons and ours were empty, our hearts were emboldened by our faith in the ideals of equality and equity.

  Every day I was being abused and called names—traitor, heretic, etc.—in the fundamentalist newspapers. I expected as much from them, but through this ordeal I also got to take a closer look at some familiar faces who always claimed to be secular and who were always perfectly progressive in their public interactions. One of them alleged that the BJP, a right-wing political party of India, was trying to ‘use certain Bangladeshis to produce an exaggerated narrative of the consequences of the demolition of the mosque to spread fiction and gossip’. This was the latest false charge against me, that the BJP had paid me to write Lajja.

  In reaction to such statements Shibnarayan Roy observed:

  We are all communal and god-fearing behind our masks. The educated Bengalis may call themselves modern but their life and history do not justify such a title. Till date the Bengali has been unable to overcome his Hindu or Muslim identity and truly become human.

  It was an observation Safi Ahmed agreed with and he did not back out from making an unhesitant confession.

  The fault of communalism is something we are all infected with to varying degrees and simply covering up or denying the wound does not make it any less real. One has to be brave enough to make such an admission, identify the disease, and then work towards the cure. We were all born with communal tendencies and we have been nurtured in its atmosphere for the past forty-six years. It flows in our veins consciously or unconsciously. Not just as tools of exploitation for the powerful overlords, behind our masks all of us nurture and nourish this ideology . . . It is only by revealing that we can absolve ourselves of our shame. Shame will not cause riots, shame will bring us together.

  When the government was out gunning for me it was not easy for anyone to write in favour of the book or me. Despite such apprehensions many people wrote to me in support and the ones who did not either did not like me, or did not prefer my writing in general, or did not agree with my observations in Lajja. That was perfectly understandable; I did not like most of my own work. Even though I liked what I had tried to say with Lajja, I did not like how I had said it. The same story could have formed the basis of a touching novel and the characters too could have been more humanized. I was aware that the book possessed none of the depth and scope required of a novel, and being aware of this I was deeply embarrassed whenever someone effusively praised the book, although secretly it also gave me inspiration to write something great without losing my courage and strength.

  Even if pride had made me inconsiderate, or self-importance had rendered me blind, I don’t think I would have been able to claim that someone some day was going to look up my book while writing a history of literature, or this book was going to rescue the honour of our race. Instead I firmly believed that many were rather hyperbolic in their assessment of the book, and me too, perhaps because the book had been banned and reactionary factions were out to get me.

  I had never met Bashir Al Helal, a renowned novelist of the country, and one of his columns startled me no end.

  Isn’t it natural that Hindus will write about Muslims and vice-versa? Does the government believe this harms the state? No, it does not. Rather it benefits the state. If communal tensions are to rise in India we will be able to proudly say that one of our writers has written a novel about our Hindu minorities. Isn’t this a thing of pride, a mark of humanity? The truth cannot remain hidden for long. While writing the history of our literature people will single out such books and that day Lajja will defend our honour . . . I consider Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja to be an outstanding novel, the kind that has hitherto not been written in Bangladesh. It is profound and it packs quite the punch, but whatever she has written is the truth and some may not take kindly to such harsh unadorned honesty.

  Even in West Bengal Lajja managed to create enormous controversy. Pirated copies were out and these were being rampantly sold in markets, thoroughfares, trains, buses, basically everywhere, and various debates regarding the novel were on. Maitreyi Chattopadhyay questioned the narratives that existed around similar oppression of Indian Muslims by the Hindu right and asked why a book like Lajja was yet to be written about the plight of minorities in India. According to her this was a source of shame not for Taslima Nasrin but for the people of India.

  A minister of the state government of West Bengal remarked, ‘It will be wrong to take Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja as an accurate depiction of the actual conditions prevalent in Bangladesh at this moment.’ The communists of West Bengal were vigilant so that no attacks were carried out on the Muslim minorities of the state. This vigilance was less because of their love for their Muslim citizens and more because of a desire to conserve their Muslim vote bank. I was clear about one thing: I was fine with Lajja being called a false account if that ensured the safety of the minorities of West Bengal. I was not upset by what the communists had to say, but what did make me sad was when they alleged that either the Anandabazar Group or the BJP had made me write anti-Islamic things.

  I had dedicated the book to Buddhadev Guha and this too was used to criticize me. According to them Buddhadev Guha was a BJP spokesperson and he had even written the manifesto for the party. I had met Guha at the Ananda Puraskar ceremony. A lively, fun-loving man with a remarkable sense of humour, such bold and quick-witted people were hard to come by. Wherever he was, whichever city or distant forest, he never failed to write to me about his adventures and his love for Bangladesh and its people. I was not aware if he was a BJP or CPI(M) supporter, if he was a staunch believer or an utter atheist. He had dedicated one of his books to me. If someone were to do that it did not necessarily mean I had to return the favour in kind. I was an avid reader of his work, I respected him, and which is why I had dedicated the book to him.

  The publisher of Lajja dropped by to see me. The book was not on sale any more and his business had taken a massive hit. Before the ban the seventh edition had been in circulation and nearly 60,000 copies had been sold. However, nothing could make Altaf Hossain aka Minu any less unhappy. He was not being able to sell the book in Bangladesh and neither could he export the book to West Bengal. When I had handed him the manuscript he had been less than thrilled. His long face had broken into a wide smile only after seeing the sales at the book fair. That smile was nowhere visible any more. ‘They’ve banned the book. My business has taken a hit. Give me something new to print.’

  What new book was I supposed to give him? I was rewriting Lajja, keeping the incidents and the facts the same but correcting errors in language and style and making the characters more flexible and real. Not one of the novels I had written thus far was any good. They had been printed but when I sat down and flipped through one all I noticed were the spelling and syntactical errors, and the problems with language or plot. It never failed to get me down and whenever a publisher came to me with a freshly printed copy of a novel their joy usually disappeared as soon as I got a chance to glance through the first
few pages. Invariably, seeing my anxiety they would ask me to correct the mistakes so they could incorporate the corrections in the subsequent editions.

  Minu was talking from time to time. ‘I received word that Lajja is being sold at a bookshop in New Market. Not just that, it’s being sold at the science fair, on the streets, in newspaper stalls and in the flower markets. Eighty taka without the cover and hundred otherwise.’

  ‘A 40 taka book is being sold for 100! The readers are paying 60 taka more for it? Then the ban has only harmed the reading public!’

  ‘You are worried about the readers but you are not thinking about how much harm it has done to me! There was an order from Calcutta for 10,000 copies but I could not send it.’

  ‘You just told me the book is being sold here. How did they get the book? Since you are not selling it.’

  ‘How can I sell it? The police are coming to my shop twice a day. They have taken all the books already, even the ones in the godown and the unfinished ones at the binder’s. Pirated copies of the book are out.’

  ‘I heard about pirated copies being sold in Calcutta, but it’s happening here too? So how did the ban help the government?’

  ‘The pirated copies flooded the market within two days of the ban. There are some in Banglabazar too who deal in pirated books.Maybe it was one of them. I have no news as yet.’

  ‘What is the police saying? The government has banned the book, so why does it not ensure the book is not sold?’

  ‘They are not selling the book out in the open. They keep it hidden away. Only when you ask them secretly do they bring out a copy for you. They wrap it in newspaper. My guy went and bought three!’