Summary Of Lajja Novel by Taslima Nasrin

 LAJJA (SHAME)

Author: Taslima Nasrin

Original dates and places of publication: 1993, Bangladesh; 1994, India

Publishers: Ananda Publishers; Penguin Books

Literary form: Novel

SUMMARY

Taslima Nasrin, a former physician from Bangladesh, is a poet, novelist, and journalist and an outspoken feminist. 

Lajja (Shame) 

may be a documentary novel about the plight of a Hindu family in Bangladesh persecuted by Muslim fundamentalists during an epidemic of anti-Hindu violence in 1992. On December 6, 1992, Hindu extremists demolished the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, India. The incident began weeks of mob violence in India during which quite 1,200 people were killed. In Bangladesh, Muslims terrorized Hindus and ransacked and burned Hindu temples, shops, and houses in retaliation. Hindus are a minority in Bangladesh, which has an Islamic constitution.

The novel traces the events of 13 days within the lifetime of a fictional family, the Duttas—Sudhamoy Dutta, a physician, his wife Kironmoyee and their grown children Suranjan and Maya—in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri mosque. It also reflects Hindu complaints of persistent violation of their rights.

Many Hindu friends of the Dutta family crossed the border into India to settle with relatives, particularly after a 1990 wave of anti-Hindu violence. 

But Sudhamoy, an invalid, had to move back from the countryside to the capital, Dhaka, after being forced from his house and land. He chooses to remain , though his wife wants to escape to India.

Sudhamoy, an atheist who fought for the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, believes with a naive mixture of optimism and idealism that his country won't let him down. His son, Suranjan, rebels against the prospect of getting to escape his home as that they had in 1990, when the family took shelter within the home of Muslim friends.

“After independence the reactionaries who had been against the very spirit of independence had gained power,” Suranjan thinks, “changed the face of the constitution and revived the evils of communalism and unbending fundamentalism that had been rejected during the war of independence.” Unlawfully and unconstitutionally, Suranjan recalls, Islam became the national religion of Bangladesh.

Suranjan catalogs the many violent incidents representing the heavy toll that communalism—chauvinism and prejudice supported religious identity—and religious fundamentalism have taken in Bangladesh over the years. He remembers the looting and burning by Muslims in Hindu communities in October 1990. Women were abducted and raped, people were beaten and thrown out of their houses, and property was confiscated. 

Suranjan is critical of the failure of the government to guard Hindus. “Why don’t we work to free all State policies, social norms and education policies from the infiltration of religion?” he asks. “If we would like the introduction of secularism, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Gita must be recited as often because the Quran is on radio and television . What we must enforce is that the banning of faith from all State activities. In schools, colleges and universities all religious functions, prayers, the teachings of spiritual texts and therefore the glory dying of lives of spiritual personae, should be banned.”

The terror finally reaches the Dutta family when a gaggle of seven young men invade the house and abduct 21-year-old Maya. Suranjan and his Muslim friend, Haider, search the streets of Dhaka for Maya but can find no sign of her. Maya isn't found and is presumed dead. Within the end Suranjan and his family plan to flee to India, their lives and their hopes for his or her country in ruins. “There was absolutely nobody to depend on,” 

Nasrin writes, “He was an alien in his own country.”