Listen to this article:

Kolkata: The air at Kolkata’s Rabindra Sadan auditorium, last weekend, was thick with the rhetoric of freedom. The hitherto exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin stood at the podium, fiercely championing the individual’s right to speak without fear. “Security of a writer is the security of free speech,” she said. 

Seconds later, drama took over. When Nasrin invited Sahitya Akademi Award-winning, celebrated Bengali poet Joy Goswami onto the stage to speak, a section of the audience erupted into furious booing. Goswami was forced back to his seat. Nasrin’s repeated pleas for allowing the poet to speak went unheeded.

Noted Bengali poet Joy Goswami at Rabindra Sadan, in Kolkata, West Bengal, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. A brief commotion broke out at an auditorium on Saturday after Nasrin invited Goswami to join her on stage, prompting protests from a section of the audience and briefly interrupting her address. Photo: PTI.

Taslima Nasrin is an exiled Bangladeshi author and human rights activist known for her writings on women’s oppression and religious criticism. Nasrin was driven out of Bangladesh in 1994 following fundamentalist death threats over her novel Lajja that spoke about brutal religious persecution of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh following the Babri Masjid demolition. She took refuge in Bengal after touring various European countries but was forced to leave in November 2007 by the Left government in the state, after violent street protests erupted against her memoir Dwikhandito.  

Nasrin’s two-day return to Bengal is wrapped in a complex political paradox, where a crusade for secularism and individual liberty was unfolding under the shadow of a deeply fractured, majoritarian mandate that had, months ago, catapulted a communal Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party to power in West Bengal.

“Back in a free Bengal after 20 years,” Nasrin had posted on social media on July 14, signalling her joy at returning to Kolkata, which she has long called her “second........

© The Wire