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Urbashi Barat

'Writing the Self: Taslima Nasrin's Autobiography and the Silent Voices of Bengali Feminism'

Taslima Nasrin, the Bangladeshi poet, novelist and essayist, is arguably South Asia's most controversial writer, even more so than Salman Rushdie, with whom she has often been (usually unfairly) compared. Perhaps she is the only South Asian whose strongly and unambiguously expressed views on unequal gender relationships in society have forced her to live in exile abroad – Rushdie's decision to do so was a matter of choice, and was taken before he began writing at all – unwelcome even in an apparently more liberal and more politically correct Indian Bengal (Bangladesh and Indian Bengal were, before the partition of India in 1947, one State, and continue to share a common culture and socio-political traditions). Certainly she is possibly the only contemporary writer anywhere in the world whose autobiography has been banned in her own country, even if it is regarded as the finest example of writing a life and discovering selfhood in contemporary Bengali literature on both sides of the border. I would like to suggest in this paper that the violence of the responses to Nasrin's autobiography is due to the discomfort and the fear caused by her assertion of her femininity and her selfhood and her refusal to accept the patriarchal norms of a society unable and unwilling to accept a woman who with searing honesty exposes male exploitation and oppression in everyday familial relationships in her own life, rather than because of any anti-Islamic bias it reveals. Perhaps only two other South Asian women, the Indian poet Kamala Das in My Story and the Pakistani aristocrat Tehmina Durrani in My Feudal Lord, have examined their lives with the same openness – notably, both chose to write in English, which allowed them an upper-class, Westernized audience who were prepared to accept their ideas more readily than the traditional middle-class readers of Nasrin's native Bengal – but neither exhibits her pain, her incisive indictment of patriarchal (rather than Islamic) society, and above all her same ability to survive. Indeed, Nasrin is the only woman writer of note in contemporary Bengal to write an autobiography at all; most Bengali women prefer to fictionalize their personal experiences and write themselves into life through disguised narrative. As I analyse her study of the growth of her own ideas and beliefs about life I relate Nasrin to the long tradition of Bengali feminist protest that has expressed itself indirectly, from the anonymous medieval folk-songs about Sita in the ancient epic Ramayana, whom male India has made into an icon for womanly submission and wifely devotion, to the myriad sentimental novels about self-sacrificing women at the turn of the nineteenth century and the Bildungsromans of the twentieth. Bengali women have always protested in different ways, but the sound of their voices has remained unheard under the blanket of the male canon. Nasrin's autobiography thrusts the weight of that burden aside and, in establishing her self, allows all those silent voices to sing out.

Bio:
Urbashi Barat was born and educated in Calcutta (now Kolkata),India, and moved to Jabalpur, a small town in central India, after her marriage in 1971. She has been teaching English for over 20 years and has been working in the Department of Postgraduate Studies & Research in English of Rani Durgavati University, Jabalpur, since 1988. She has published a book in Graham Greene and more than 50 research articles, mainly on fiction and women's studies. Her academic interests include twentieth-century fiction in English, women's studies (especially women's writing in English and Bengali in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and English-Language Teaching in India. At present she is studying the similarities and the differences in women's writing in English in postcolonial societies in the last decade of the twentieth century, in particular between women who are the descendants of white settlers and use English as their first language and those who acquired English through their colonial experience.

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