Taslima Nasrin (born 25 August 1962) is a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist. She is known for her writings on feminism and her criticism of Islam; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh.
She gained global attention by the beginning of the 1990s owing to her essays and novels with feminist views and criticism of what she characterises as all "misogynistic" religions. Nasrin has been living in exile since 1994, with multiple fatwas calling for her death. After living more than a decade in Europe and the United States, she moved to India in 2004 and has been staying there on a resident permit, multiple-entry, or 'X' visa since.
Nasrin has been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, including both Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal during the governments of Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Trinamool Congress. After Bharatiya Janata Party's victory in state legislative assembly of West Bengal in 2026, she returned to Kolkata after nearly 20 years in exile from the city.
Early life and career Nasrin was born in East Pakistan to Dr. Rajab Ali and Edul Ara, of Mymensingh. Her father was a physician, and a professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Mymensingh Medical College, as well as at Sir Salimullah Medical College, Dhaka, and Dhaka Medical College. After completing high school in 1976 (SSC) and higher secondary studies in college (HSC) in 1978, she studied medicine at Mymensingh Medical College, an affiliated medical college of the University of Dhaka, and graduated in 1984 with an MBBS degree. Her Hindu ancestor Haradhan Sarkar was a Kayastha.
In college, she wrote and edited a poetry journal called Shenjuti. After graduation, she worked at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, then practised at the gynaecology department of Mitford hospital and at the anaesthesia department of Dhaka Medical College hospital. While she studied and practised medicine, she saw girls who had been raped; she also heard women cry out in despair in the delivery room if their baby was a girl. Born into a Muslim family, she became an atheist over time. In the course of writing, she took a feminist approach.
Literary career Early in her literary career, Nasrin wrote mainly poetry, and published half a dozen collections of poetry between 1982 and 1993, often with female oppression as a theme, and often containing very graphic language. She started publishing prose in the late 1980s and produced three collections of essays and four novels before the publication of her documentary novel Lajja (), in which a Hindu family was attacked by Muslim fanatics and decided to leave the country. Nasrin suffered a number of physical and other attacks for her critical scrutiny of Islam and her demands for women's equality. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets demanding her execution by hanging. In October 1993, a radical fundamentalist group called the Council of Islamic Soldiers offered a bounty for her death.
In May 1994, she was interviewed by the Kolkata edition of The Statesman, which quoted her as calling for a revision of the Quran; she claimed she only called for abolition of the Sharia, the Islamic religious law. In August 1994, she was brought up on "charges of making inflammatory statements" and faced criticism from Islamic fundamentalists. A few hundred thousand demonstrators called her "an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam"; a member of a militant faction threatened to set loose thousands of poisonous snakes in the capital unless she was executed. After spending two months in hiding, she escaped to Sweden at the end of 1994, consequently ceasing her medical practice and becoming a full-time writer and activist.
Life in exile Leaving Bangladesh towards the end of 1994, Nasrin lived in exile in Western Europe and North America for ten years. Her Bangladeshi passport had been revoked; she was granted citizenship by the Swedish government and took refuge in Germany. She allegedly had to wait six years (1994–1999) to get a visa to visit India. In 1998, she wrote Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood, her biographical account from birth to adolescence. She never got a Bangladeshi passport to return to the country to visit her parents, both of whom are now deceased.
2004–2007, life in Kolkata
In 2004, she was granted a renewable temporary residential permit by India and moved to Kolkata in the state of West Bengal, which shares a common heritage and language with Bangladesh, In an interview in 2007, after she had been forced to flee, she called Kolkata her home. The government of India extended her visa to stay in the country on a periodic basis, though it refused to grant her Indian citizenship. While living in Kolkata, Nasrin regularly contributed to Indian newspapers and magazines, including Anandabazar Patrika and Desh, and, for some time, wrote a weekly column in the Bengali version of The Statesman.
Again, her criticism of Islam was met with opposition from religious fundamentalists: in June 2006, Syed Noorur Rehaman Barkati, the imam of Kolkata's Tipu Sultan Mosque, admitted offering money to anyone who "blackened [that is, publicly humiliated] Ms Nasreen's face." Even abroad, controversy followed: on the US Independence Day weekend in 2005, she criticised US foreign policy and tried to read her poem titled "America" to a large Bengali crowd at the North American Bengali Conference at Madison Square Garden in New York City, but was booed off the stage. Back in India, the "All India Muslim Personal Board (Jadeed)" offered 500,000 rupees for her beheading in March 2007. The group's president, Tauqeer Raza Khan, said the only way the bounty would be lifted was if Nasrin "apologizes, burns her books and leaves."
In 2007, elected and serving members of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen made threats against Taslima Nasreen, pledging that the fatwa against her and Salman Rushdie were to be upheld. While she was in Hyderabad releasing Telugu translations of her work, she was attacked by party members led by three MLAs- Mohammed Muqtada Khan, Mohammed Moazzam Khan and Syed Ahmed Pasha Quadri - were then charged and arrested.
Expulsion from Kolkata On 9 August 2007, Nasrin was in Hyderabad to present the Telugu translation of one of her novels, Shodh, when she was allegedly attacked by a mob led by legislators from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, an Indian political party. A week later, on 17 August, Muslim leaders in Kolkata revived an old fatwa against her, urging her to leave the country and offering an unlimited amount of money to anyone who would kill her. On 21 November, Kolkata witnessed a protest against Nasrin. A protest organised by the "All India Minority Forum" caused chaos in the city and forced the army's deployment to restore order.
The government of India kept Nasrin in an undisclosed location in New Delhi, effectively under house arrest, for more than seven months. In January 2008, she was selected for the Simone de Beauvoir award in recognition of her writing on women's rights, but she declined to go to Paris to receive the award. She explained that "I don't want to leave India at this stage and would rather fight for my freedom here," but she had to be hospitalised for three days with several complaints. The house arrest quickly acquired an international dimension: in a letter to the London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International, India's former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey urged the organisation to pressure the Indian government so that Nasrin could safely return to Kolkata.
From New Delhi, Nasrin commented: "I'm writing a lot, but not about Islam, It's not my subject now. This is about politics. In the last three months I have been put under severe pressure to leave [West] Bengal by the police." In an email interview from the undisclosed safehouse, Nasrin talked about the stress caused by "this unendurable loneliness, this uncertainty and this deathly silence." She cancelled the publication of the sixth part of her autobiography Nei Kichu Nei ("No Entity"), and — under pressure — deleted some passages from Dwikhandito, the controversial book that was the boost for the riots in Kolkata. She was forced to leave India on 19 March 2008.
Nasrin moved to Sweden in 2008 and later worked as a research scholar at New York University. Since, as she claims, "her soul lived in India," she also pledged her body to the country, by awarding it for posthumous medical use to Gana Darpan, a Kolkata-based NGO, in 2005. She eventually returned to India, but was forced to stay in New Delhi as the West Bengal government refused to permit her entry. Currently, her visa received a one-year extension in 2016 and Nasreen is also seeking permanent residency in India but no decision has been taken on it by the Home Ministry.
In 2015 Nasrin was threatened with death by Al Qaeda-linked extremists, and so the Center for Inquiry assisted her in travelling to the United States, where she now lives. The Center for Inquiry (CFI) that helped evacuate her to the US on 27 May gave an official statement in June 2015 stating that her safety "is only temporary if she cannot remain in the U.S., however, which is why CFI has established an emergency fund to help with food, housing, and the means for her to be safely settled".
Literary works
Nasrin started writing poetry when she was thirteen. While still at college in Mymensingh, she published and edited a literary magazine, SeNjuti ("Light in the dark"), from 1978 to 1983. She published her first collection of poems in 1986. Her second collection, Nirbashito Bahire Ontore ("Banished within and without") was published in 1989. She succeeded in attracting a wider readership when she started writing columns in late 1980s, and, in the early 1990s, she began writing novels, for which she has won significant acclaim. In all, she has written more than thirty books of poetry, essays, novels, short stories, and memoirs, and her books have been translated into 20 different languages.
Her own experience of sexual abuse during adolescence and her work as a gynaecologist influenced her a great deal in writing about the treatment of women in Islam and against religion in general. Her writing is characterised by two connected elements: her struggle with the religion of her native culture, and her feminist philosophy. She cites Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir as influences, and, when pushed to think of one closer to home, Begum Rokeya, who lived during the time of undivided Bengal. Her later poetry also evidences a connection to place, to Bangladesh and India.
Columns and essays In 1989 Nasrin began to contribute to the weekly political magazine Khaborer Kagoj, edited by Nayeemul Islam Khan, and published from Dhaka. Her feminist views and anti-religion remarks articles succeeded in drawing broad attention, and she shocked the religious and conservative society of Bangladesh by her radical comments and suggestions. Later she collected these columns in a volume titled Nirbachita Column, which in 1992 won her first Ananda Purashkar award, a prestigious award for Bengali writers. During her life in Kolkata, she contributed a weekly essay to the Bengali version of The Statesman, called Dainik Statesman. Taslima has always advocated for an Indian Uniform civil code, and said that criticism of Islam is the only way to establish secularism in Islamic countries. Taslima said that Triple talaq is despicable and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board should be abolished. Taslima used to write articles for online media venture The Print in India.
Novels In 1992 Nasrin produced two novellas which failed to draw attention.