More publications that will uphold love for truth


Now it’s Taslima Nasreen’s turn.

Taslima Nasreen has faced protests at the launch of her latest memoir, with an event at the Calcutta Book Fair cancelled. Ms Nasreen is not at the event, and tweeted that her publisher was forced to launch the book outside the hall.

It would be nice if she had a blog. Twitter is all very well, but a blog gives a person room to move. I do think Taslima Nasreen should have a blog.

The protest comes in the wake of an intensified debate over artistic free speech in India. UK writer Sir Salman Rushdie recently had to abandon plans to attend a literary festival in Jaipur amid security concerns. On Sunday an artist was assaulted in a gallery in Delhi, where he is exhibiting a number of nude paintings.

And don’t forget Aseem Trivedi.

Ms Nasreen was launching Nirbasan (Exile), the latest instalment of her memoirs that gives an account of her flight from Calcutta in 2007-08…Ms Nasreen has written dozens of books of poetry, essays, novels and short stories in her native Bengali language, mostly in exile. Her most controversial book, Lajja (Shame), was banned in Bangladesh and she fled after Muslim extremists called for her death. The publisher of the latest instalment, Shibani Mukherji, told the Press Trust of India it was “determined to go ahead with more publications that will uphold values, love for truth and social progress”.

Props to Shibani Mukherji!

Now if only Taslima Nasreen had a blog…

Comments

  1. Saikat Biswas says

    Taslima’s first volume of autobiography (Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood)) is one of the most trenchantly honest writings in Bengali literature, almost uniquely so. A no-holds-barred account of how a medieval belief system sodomised a beautiful country.

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