Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

Sindoor Khela, the celebration of patriarchy

Married Bengali Hindu women celebrated their sindoor or vermilion yesterday. They do it every year. On the last day of Durga puja, women apply sindoor on the goddess’s feet or forehead and then start applying it to all the married women around, smearing each other with it.

Unmarried women or widows are not allowed to celebrate Sindoor Khela.

The main purpose of a married woman to celebrate Sindoor Khela is to be proud of having a husband no matter how pathetic, and worthless stupid he is and to wish a long happy life of the husband.

Married women wear sindoor along the parting-line of their hair. It is one of the many signs of marriage they have to wear.

Hindu widows do not wear sindoor, because their husbands are not alive.

The sindoor gives some kind of social importance to women, only because their husbands are alive. Women are blamed if their husbands die. After husbands die, women are not allowed to wear sindoor or colourful clothes. Their clothes must be white, or colourless, and they must remove all the colours from their bodies, all the happinesses from their minds, all the smiles from their faces, and they must stop eating good nutritious food, fish or meat or protein, and they must look ugly and unattractive and they must die slowly.

A widow is just a nobody or a dead body or a piece of shit. It is not necessary for widows to continue living when they are not able to serve their husbands for which they were born. Once upon a time widows were thrown into husband’s funeral pyres.

Married men do not wear anything to prove that they are married. In patriarchal traditions, men’s lives are more important than women’s lives, and women are treated as nothing but sex objects, inferior beings, child bearing machines, slaves of men. Believe it or not, instead of being rejected, Sindoor Khela the patriarchal festival is becoming popular in urban educated societies. It is very alarming that in some parts of the world, the more educated women become, the more patriarchal traditions they celebrate. Is it because educated ones can learn all kinds of systems including misogynistic much better than uneducated ones?