Homecoming or political theatre? Taslima Nasrin returns to Kolkata

I was nine years old in 2007, and barely understood what it meant when Taslima Nasrin was forced to flee Kolkata in the dead of night. I remember fragments rather than facts - a name repeated on the evening news, adults speaking in the uneasy tone they reserved for things they didn't quite want to explain to a child, and an unsettled feeling that something had gone wrong in a city I had always been told was gentle, literary, unbothered by the kind of religious violence that made headlines elsewhere. I did not know what a fatwa was. I did not fully grasp that a writer could be hounded out of her own home for writing what she believed. Nineteen years later, I understand it with uncomfortable clarity, and this time I watched her land at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport, smiling for the cameras, telling reporters that it felt very good to be back.

On August 1, Taslima Nasrin returned to Kolkata to attend a literary programme against religious fundamentalism, arriving from Sweden where she has lived for years on a long-term residence permit. Supporters gathered to welcome her at the airport, security arrangements were heavy, and the visit had already stirred considerable political noise across West Bengal well before she landed.

Speaking at the felicitation programme at Rabindra Sadan, Nasrin reflected on the years she had spent shut out of the city, framing her return as evidence that injustice could persist for a long time but never permanently. She turned, at one point, to address Kolkata itself, asking what wrong she had done to deserve her exile from it, and argued that a homeland could not be confined to a map - that the affection of people was the only country that truly mattered to her. She also thanked the state government directly for the security arrangements made for her visit, expressing her gratitude for the protection.

Taslima Nasrin was born in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, in 1962, and trained as a physician before she became a writer, a background that seems to have given her the same unflinching eye she later turned toward religion, patriarchy, and the machinery of the state. Her novel Shame (Lajja), written in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, described the persecution of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, and it enraged religious clerics almost immediately. Fatwas were issued against her, a price was placed on her head, and in 1994 she left her country in secrecy, carrying almost nothing with her, unable to return since.

Her memoir Dwikhondito, the second instalment of her memoirs, was banned by the Left Front government in West Bengal in 2003 after it was accused of hurting religious sentiments, even before she settled in Kolkata in 2004. The Calcutta High Court overturned the ban in 2005, but the resentment it had generated did not disappear. After moving to Kolkata, which she often described as her second home, Nasrin found a literary community that embraced her with something close to belonging. That sense of belonging, however, proved short-lived. In 2006, the imam of Tipu Sultan Mosque publicly announced a reward for anyone who blackened her face, and by August 2007 she had been physically attacked by activists belonging to a Muslim political organisation. By November that year, the state government decided to move her out of Kolkata, reportedly so abruptly that she did not have time to change her clothes before being shifted first to Jaipur and then to Delhi. Nasrin has repeatedly said that her departure was forced upon her, and that she never chose to leave or become a perpetual guest of whichever government was willing to tolerate her presence.

It is worth pausing to ask why this reunion is happening now, and under whose political watch it is unfolding.

West Bengal's political landscape has changed since, the party currently governing the state is a Hindu nationalist formation, and its chief minister shared the stage with Nasrin at her Rabindra Sadan event, a detail that has not gone unnoticed. Opposition leaders in Bengal have already accused the ruling party of political opportunism, pointing to her long history of criticising Islamic fundamentalism and suggesting that her sudden welcome has less to do with principle than with convenience. Members of the ruling establishment, meanwhile, argue that she was wrongfully kept out for two decades by governments that claimed to champion secularism while quietly abandoning her.

Both readings can coexist. A government that once projected Nasrin as a symbol of secular tolerance ultimately distanced itself when her presence became politically contentious. Her return under the current government has, meanwhile, been interpreted by critics as aligning with a broader political narrative around Islamic fundamentalism. Whatever the motivations, her homecoming has become entwined with competing political narratives, with different parties attaching their own meanings to it.

International relations expert Imankalyan Lahiri of Jadavpur University struck a more cautious note on the politics behind the visit. For him, an artist's return driven by political calculation is never something he could accept, whereas one driven by public or literary demand is always welcome. A writer's or a poet's homecoming, in his view, should never hinge on political convenience, since the affection so many hold for her writing ought never to be turned into a political instrument.

Speaking to Inscript, Angshuman Kar, professor at Burdwan University, pointed to a different concern altogether. He was not especially troubled by the politics surrounding her return, noting that political actors making use of writers and artists for their own ends is hardly new. What unsettled him instead was her silence when a young journalist from the outlet put a pointed question to her about attacks on minorities, particularly since she has not historically shied away from criticising both Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism. He read her evasiveness on this occasion as a warning sign, and said he hoped she would stop sidestepping such questions going forward and hold on to her neutrality, speaking up against attacks on minorities in India with the same conviction she brings to Bangladesh.

It is an old, familiar pattern. Nasrin has spent much of her life negotiating the fraught relationship between freedom of expression, religion and political power. She has repeatedly argued that her right to write should never depend on the sensitivities of governments or religious groups. Yet her experiences in both Bangladesh and India illustrate how questions of public order, religious sentiment and political convenience can converge to shape the fate of a writer.

As she returns to Kolkata after nearly two decades, the moment is significant not only because she is back in a city she once called home, but also because it revives unresolved questions about free expression, political responsibility and the cost of dissent. Whether this visit marks a genuine homecoming or another chapter in a long history of political symbolism remains a question that only time can answer.