Banned books due to Censorship

CREATIVITY & CENSORSHIP

People believe that writers and authors have the freedom to write and express their emotions and present to the world. But is it true? There are true examples of some banned books in the world which chained censorship and creativity together. 

One of the banned books is Lajja (Shame) by Taslima Nasrin.

She is an uncompromising critic of patriarchal religious traditions that she is seen as oppressive to women and an outspoken advocate of women’s social, political, and sexual liberation. In her crusading syndicated newspaper columns, collected and published in two books, she protested religious intolerance and increasing incidents of violence against women by local salish, or Islamic village councils in Bangladesh, also because the failure of the govt to require adequate measures to prevent them. consistent with Amnesty International, salish has sentenced women to death by stoning, burning, or flogging for violating the councils’ interpretation of shariah . Nasrin’s newspaper columns, her bold use of sexual imagery in her poetry, her self-declared atheism, and her iconoclastic lifestyle aroused the fury of fundamentalist clerics. By early 1992, angry mobs began attacking bookstores that sold her works. They also assaulted Nasrin at a book fair and destroyed a stall displaying her books. That year, on the way to a literary conference in India, her passport was confiscated by the Bangladeshi government, ostensibly because she listed her employment as a journalist instead of a doctor. 

Lajja (Shame) was published in Bangladesh within the Bengali language in February 1993, three months after the razing of the Babri mosque in India that touched off a wave of violence against Hindus in Bangladesh. Nasrin states during a preface to the English-language edition of the novel that she wrote the book seven days soon after the demolition of the mosque because “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. . . . The riots that happened in 1992 in Bangladesh is that the responsibility folks all, and that we are responsible . Lajja may be a document of our collective defeat.”

During the primary six months after its publication, the novel sold 60,000 copies in Bangladesh. Though panned by some critics as a didactic political tract, it had been a billboard success in both Bangladesh and neighboring Bengali speaking Calcutta, India. Pirated copies of the novel were widely circulated in India by militant Hindus. In 1994, the novel was published in English in New Delhi . (It was published within the US in October 1997.)

CENSORSHIP 

After protests by Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh, in July 1993 the Bangladeshi government banned Lajja on the grounds that it had “created misunderstanding among communities.” On September 24, 1993, Nasrin opened the daily newspaper and saw a prominently displayed notice calling for her death. A fatwa, or death decree, had been issued by a mullah, or Muslim cleric,of the Council of Soldiers of Islam, a militant group based in Sylhet, Bangladesh. It involved her execution for blasphemy and conspiracy against Islam.

The group offered a $1,250 bounty for her death. within the following weeks, additional bounties were promised. Thousands of Muslim fundamentalists attended mass rallies and marched through the streets of Dhaka, hanging and burning Nasrin in effigy. Nasrin was ready to obtain police protection only after suing the government , which, in response to international pressure, posted two cops outside her home.

The International PEN Women Writers’ Committee organized a campaign on Nasrin’s behalf, enlisting the support of human rights and women’s organizations round the world. It called on Bangladesh’s government to guard Nasrin, prosecute those that sought her death, lift the ban on her book, and restore her passport. The governments of Sweden, Norway, the US , France, and Germany lodged official protests. Sweden and Norway ultimately threatened to chop off all economic assistance.

Almost overnight, Nasrin, who was unknown outside Bangladesh and India, became a logo within the Western world of freedom of expression and women’s rights. The government of Bangladesh returned Nasrin’s passport, but no arrests were made, albeit making a death threat and offering a gift for it's criminal offense in Bangladesh.

At the time, Bangladesh was governed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party under Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, the widow of President Ziaur Rahman, a military general assassinated in 1981. Prime Minister Zia was elected with the support of the Muslim party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which held 20 seats in Parliament. Critics of the govt contended that she capitulated to fundamentalist demands within the Nasrin case to preserve her electoral coalition.

In April 1994, after the return of her passport, Nasrin traveled to France, where she spoke at a gathering marking International Press Freedom Day. Returning to Bangladesh through India, she gave an interview to the English-language daily the Calcutta Statesman, which quoted her as saying, “The Koran should be revised thoroughly.” In a letter to the Bangladeshi and Indian press, Nasrin denied making the reported remarks, but in her denial she wrote that “the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible and every one such religious texts” were “out of place and out of your time .”

In Bangladesh, fundamentalists took to the streets by the tens of thousands in daily demonstrations calling for her death. Mobs attacked the offices of newspapers that showed sympathy for her and ransacked bookstores carrying her books. Religious groups pressed the government for her arrest. On June 4, 1994, the Bangladeshi government brought charges against her under a rarely used 19th-century statute dating from the age of British colonialism that proscribes statements or writings “intended to outrage the religious feeling of any class by insulting its religion or religious believers.” The crime carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison.When a warrant was issued for her arrest, Nasrin left her apartment and went underground.

In an interview given just before going into hiding, Nasrin explained, “So many injustices are administered here within the name of Allah. I cannot stop writing against these simply to save lots of my very own skin. The Koran can not function with the idea of our law. It stands within the way of progress and within the way of women’s emancipation. The matter is the intolerance of the fundamentalists. I fight with my pen, and that they want to fight with a sword. I say what I feel and that they want to kill me. I will never allow them to intimidate me.”

On August 3, after protracted negotiations among her legal advisers, Western ambassadors, and therefore the government of Bangladesh, Nasrin was granted bail and ordered to appear for trial at a later, unspecified date. She fled to Stockholm, Sweden, and remained in exile in Europe and therefore the us . (In 1998, she returned to Bangladesh to worry for her critically ill mother and was again forced to travel into hiding due to threats and demonstrations against her.) In 2005, Nasrin moved to Kolkata, India, where she hoped to get permanent residency. The Indian government, instead, granted her a series of temporary visas. After violent protests by Muslim groups in Kolkata in 2007, the govt moved her to Jaipur, then to a secure house in Delhi, and restricted her movements. In March 2008, Nasrin, protesting her confinement in Delhi, left India for Europe and therefore the US .

“The mullahs who would murder me will kill everything progressive in Bangladesh if they're allowed to prevail,” Nasrin wrote in her preface to 

Lajja. “It is my duty to undertake to guard my beautiful country from them, and I turn all those that share my values to assist me defend my rights. I am convinced that the sole way the fundamentalist forces are often stopped is that if all folks who are secular and humanistic join together and fight their malignant influence. I, for one, won't be silenced.” More than 16 years after the primary efforts to censor Nasrin, she still faced bans of her writing and threats against her life.

All four volumes of her autobiography published in 1999–2004, including Meyebela: My Bengali Girl-hood (1999), were banned in Bangladesh.