| Abstract: | Abstract This article situates Taslima Nasrin, the controversial writer from Bangladesh, in a particular political and religious moment in the history of Bangladesh, to analyse the difficult relationship the postcolonial state shares with a writer whose work deliberately unsettles the issues of minority and of women and/in religion. The complex mosaic of Nasrin’s work, comprising as varied genres as newspaper columns, poetry and popular novels, has engendered, in the last ten years, unprecedented responses both for and against her writing. This has brought the issue of literature and its uneasy negotiation with state politics to the forefront of national debate. Despised by Islamists and fundamentalists, equally loved and loathed by the reading public, considered with caution by secular intelligentsia and fellow feminists, and ultimately banned by the state, Nasrin is a unique case in point. Her work, written under the gaze of the state defying the fundamentalist fatwa demanding her death, hence invites discussions on state censorship invoked using religious sensibility as a marker of literary judgement and the associated perils of women writing on women in a postcolony like Bangladesh. |
