“It is said that peace is the basic tenet of all religion. Yet it is in the name of religion that there has been so much disturbance, bloodshed and persecution,” wrote a 32-year-old Taslima Nasrin, in her mother tongue and on her homeland, with the belief that her own people would listen to the truth.

Taslima Nasrin. Pics/AFP

In 1992, two years before her most famous publication, Lajja, came out, Nasrin won the prestigious Ananda Puruskar. The same year, Islamic fundamentalists in Bangladesh instituted the Taslima Smash Committee. This kind of Manichean reaction of the society was repeated when Lajja, a documentary novel narrated the story of a Hindu family surviving as a minority in Bangladesh gained critical acclaim. Again, the writer was persecuted by 3,00,000 fundamentalists. It seems to be a leitmotif in her strife even now.