Kolkata / Dhaka: In the sticky heat of a Kolkata July, Taslima Nasreen walked out of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport wrapped in a white saree edged in red. Conch shells sounded, marigolds rained down, and a crowd of well-wishers pressed forward to greet her. Nearly nineteen years had passed since she’d last called the city home, and the emotion on her face needed no translation. For a writer who has spent decades being pushed from one shore to another, this was not simply a visit. It was the reopening of a door she had assumed was shut for good.
At almost the same moment, several hundred kilometers away, another exiled Bengali woman was making a very different kind of announcement. Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh who has been sheltering in India since fleeing a popular uprising, declared that she intends to go home by December 2026 — despite a death sentence hanging over her head. She said she was not afraid of dying, and that if death came, she wanted it to come on Bangladeshi soil. Her plan, as she described it, is to return with senior figures from her banned Awami League party, surrender to the courts, and challenge the verdict head-on.
Two Bengali women, two exiles, two returns — one already completed, one still a gamble on the horizon. Set side by side, they tell strikingly different stories about power, protest, and what it costs to go home.
The Writer Who Was Exiled by Fear
Nasreen’s troubles trace back to 1993, when her novel Lajja depicted anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. The book earned her death threats from religious hardliners, and by 1994 she had fled the country of her birth. After years of moving between European cities, she settled into Kolkata in 2004, drawn by a shared language and a culture that felt, in her words, like home.
That comfort didn’t last. In November 2007, the second volume of her memoir, Dwikhandito, triggered protests from groups who claimed it insulted religious sentiment. Streets were blocked, effigies burned, and the Left Front government of the time — wary of further unrest — quietly moved her out of the city. She eventually left India altogether before returning years later on a long-term visa, settling in Delhi. For nearly two decades, no West Bengal government saw fit to bring her back for public literary life.
That changed this year. Her arrival at the end of July, followed by a public appearance at Rabindra Sadan on August 1, was organized by secular literary groups and drew West Bengal’s chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, who personally guaranteed her security and told her she was welcome to return “as many times as you want, and stay as long as you want.” Nasreen has been careful to credit the invitation to the organizers rather than any single party, while acknowledging that it was the new state administration that made her safety possible. Her presence reopened old arguments about free expression, religious sensitivity, and how far a government should go to protect a voice it might find inconvenient.
Yet the homecoming is only partial. Bangladesh itself remains closed to her. No government there — not under Hasina, not under her rival Khaleda Zia, not since — has ever invited her back. She travels on a Swedish passport now, a citizen of nowhere in particular, permanently unresolved with the country that made her a writer worth silencing.
The Prime Minister Who Was Exiled by Her Own People
Sheikh Hasina’s story runs in almost the opposite direction. As the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, she spent decades building one of the most dominant political careers in South Asia — surviving assassination attempts, weathering long spells out of power, and eventually governing for more than fifteen years across multiple terms. Her tenure brought real economic growth, but also mounting accusations of authoritarian rule and the steady erosion of democratic checks.
It all came apart in the summer of 2024. What began as student protests against a civil service quota system swelled into a nationwide uprising against her government. The crackdown that followed was brutal — estimates of the dead range into the hundreds, with United Nations figures putting the toll as high as 1,400. When crowds finally reached her official residence, Hasina fled by helicopter to India, ending her rule in a matter of days.
Since then, a special tribunal in Bangladesh has tried her in absentia, convicting her of crimes against humanity for her role in ordering and failing to stop the violent crackdown, and sentencing her to death. Her party has been banned outright. Hasina calls the verdict a political vendetta dressed up as justice, and insists her planned return — surrendering alongside loyal colleagues — is an act of duty rather than defiance, meant to expose what she considers a sham trial from the inside. Authorities in Dhaka have made clear she would likely be arrested the moment she lands; some have said as much with open satisfaction.
Two Exiles, One Unfinished History
The contrast between these two women is almost too clean to be real. Nasreen was driven out by mobs and by governments too nervous of those mobs to protect her; her offense was refusing to soften her feminism, her secularism, or her criticism of religious extremism. Hasina was driven out by the very citizens she governed, after a security response that left hundreds dead; her homecoming, if it happens, will be a direct confrontation with the institutions she once commanded.
And yet both women are bound by the same unfinished argument that has shadowed Bengal and Bangladesh since 1971 — the tension between a secular, pluralist vision of the nation and a more majoritarian, conservative one. Nasreen speaks of a Bengal that exists whole in her heart, even as the border keeps half of it closed to her. Hasina invokes her parents’ sacrifice and the founding promises of independence as the moral case for her own return.
West Bengal’s political shift made room for one homecoming without major bloodshed, though a small disturbance at Nasreen’s event was a reminder that old tensions haven’t disappeared. Bangladesh’s post-uprising order, by contrast, remains raw and contested, still shaped by the memory of those who died in 2024.
What both stories ultimately show is how fragile the idea of “home” can be for anyone who challenges power — whether through a pen or from a prime minister’s office. Exile can silence a person or, just as easily, sharpen their resolve. Return can heal old wounds, or reopen them entirely. Nasreen’s arrival in Kolkata suggests that closed doors can reopen when politics shifts. Hasina’s promised return, sentence and all, suggests that some people would rather face a firing squad of accountability than live forever outside the story of their own country.
