A house for Taslima Nasrin: Kolkata’s chance to right a historic wrong

When Taslima Nasrin returns to Kolkata on August 1, 2026, after nearly two decades of forced exile, it will be more than a personal homecoming. It will be Bengal’s moment of reckoning.

Almost a decade ago, I met Taslima at a restaurant in central Delhi. When I asked what she missed the most, she said in a choked voice: “Home.” She had by then reconciled herself to never seeing Bangladesh again. But what pained her just as much was losing Kolkata, the city she had chosen as her home but was forced to leave in 2007.

She believed her “beloved Kolkata” would not welcome her in life and, therefore, hoped to embrace it in death. “When I die, take my body to the mortuary of the medical college in Kolkata, where I have donated it.”

That one sentence captures Bengal’s moral, constitutional and intellectual failure more poignantly than anything else. As Bengali author Annada Shankar Roy famously observed, “Bangladesh is Taslima’s mother; West Bengal is her aunt.” Ironically, the aunt proved even less compassionate than the mother. Taslima fled Islamist persecution in Bangladesh in search of refuge. And she was thrown out of Bengal as the famed bhadralok of the city kept looking the other way.

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The shame of 2007 remains one of the darkest chapters in Bengal’s democratic history. A government that endlessly sermonised about secularism, liberalism and human rights did precisely what the Islamists wanted: it gagged the voice of a writer and sent her into exile merely to pacify those baying for her blood.

In her memoir Exile, Taslima recalls the then Kolkata Police Commissioner, Prasun Mukherjee, telling her: “There will be a riot in Kolkata because of you if you continue to stay here.”

Her response was devastating in its simplicity: “I have lived here for so many years. Nothing has happened. And now I am meant to believe there will suddenly be a riot?”

The Commissioner’s answer exposed the state’s meek surrender to Islamist thuggery: “The decision rests on you.”

It rested on Taslima Nasrin, rather than on those issuing death threats.

She was told to leave the city.

“So where should I go?” Taslima asked.

“Anywhere. Europe… America… Kerala… Madhya Pradesh… the jungle. Just disappear,” she was told.

Even more disturbing is her account of a conversation with the then Director General of Police, Vineet Goel. She was informed that Islamist goons planned to assassinate her after Friday prayers.

“Why aren’t you arresting them?” Taslima asked the DGP.

Pat came the response: “We can’t touch the Muslims. There’ll be a riot.”

But, as she pointed out, this was “not a Hindu-Muslim issue. It’s a terrorism issue. If someone has done something wrong, shouldn’t they be punished?”

Instead of arresting those threatening murder, the state pushed her into hiding and eventually hounded her out of the state altogether.

If the response of the political class was deplorable, Bengal’s celebrated literary establishment did not emerge unscathed either. The same cultural elite that had once embraced Taslima suddenly found her inconvenient. She was cancelled long before cancel culture became mainstream. The Left Front dismissed Lajja as an unworthy book. Mrinal Sen, one of the giants of the bhadralok intelligentsia, described it as “a pile of putrefying garbage”. Others went beyond the book to call her names.

Taslima was astonished. In Split, she recalls that while Left-‘liberal’ intellectuals in Bangladesh defended Lajja, many of their ideological counterparts in West Bengal denounced it. “The scene in India was actually the complete reverse of how it was in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the Left-liberal secular intellectuals, except Badruddin Umar, were all of the opinion that it was a valuable book. But in India people of similar political and ethical dispositions were calling Lajja garbage. Only a handful of people from West Bengal, despite being inclined towards the Left, were speaking on behalf of the book. All I could do was sit back and watch in amazement as the book was cleverly turned into a pawn in political games.”

The irony was brutal. While the government of Bengal vied with the government of Bangladesh to appease Islamists, the Left-‘liberals’ failed to do what their counterparts in Dhaka could do in a far more adverse socio-political scenario.

German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once famously said, “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” Bengal and its celebrated politico-intellectual establishment failed that test miserably.

Taslima’s exile, however, did not end with Kolkata. She was quietly flown to Jaipur, supposedly for two days, only to discover that local officials had been misled by the Kolkata Police into believing she had arrived for a literary festival — a lie that was peddled to throw her out of Bengal.

Eventually, she was pushed to Delhi, where she stayed, with her life closely monitored and strictly regulated.

Ironically, Rajasthan at that time had a BJP government, which too refused to bail Taslima out. Maybe because the BJP was still seven years away from the ‘tsuNamo’ revolution that busted the myth of the Muslim veto in Indian politics.

Taslima’s upcoming Kolkata visit, therefore, is far more than the return of an exiled writer. It is an opportunity for Bengal to recover something it has steadily lost — its liberal ethos and intellectual conscience. It should not merely permit Taslima to make occasional visits, but give her a home in Kolkata.

A house for Taslima would not simply honour a persecuted writer. It would proclaim that Bengal has rediscovered its lost soul and regained its true liberal confidence. It would also affirm that constitutional freedoms cannot be negotiated away in the face of violent intimidation. Most importantly, it would restore an idea that once defined Bengal: that a civilisation grows stronger not by silencing dissent, but by protecting it.

A house for Taslima Nasrin would be Kolkata’s redemption — and a chance to right a historic wrong.

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)