Taslima Nasreen

After she had to leave her country of birth, Bangladesh, in 1994, Taslima Nasreen spent a decade in Europe. She found a place she could call "home" again in Kolkata from 2004-2007. But in 2007, after violent protests from Islamic fundamentalists she was forced to leave the city and eventually had to leave the country too.

Her book, Dwikhondito (loosely means divided into two) had riled fundamentalists as they claimed that sections in the book criticised the Prophet. A fatwa was declared and a price put on her head. What surprised and disappointed her more, though, was that an influential section of the writers' community, too, had been vitriolic about Dwikhondito and some even compared her to a sex worker, in print. Subsequently, a group of 25 intellectuals were picked to decide the fate of the book by the then Left Front government and they had agreed to ban the memoir.

"I was shocked that a progressive Left government sided with fundamentalists against a persecuted writer," says Nasrin, currently in New Delhi and after a pause adds, "The Left is supposed to champion secularism and freedom of speech, right?" Since then, nearly a decade has passed and the ruling party in West Bengal has changed, but Nasreen does not have much hope of returning to where she longs to be.

"I am a Bengali, I love to live in Kolkata. It is my second home. But I do not have much hope of returning there. Nothing much has changed after the change of government.  The Trinamool Congress government has shown no inclination to get me back," she says.

She reminded that the launch of her autobiographical book, Nirbashan, had to be cancelled at the Kolkata book fair in 2012 at the last hour. (The book has now been translated into English as Exile, by Maharghya Chakraborty, a PhD scholar at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences and published by Penguin.)