Taslima Nasreen:What made her what she is

Taslima Nasreen is Bengali Bangladeshi ex-physician turned author, feminist, and journalist.

Taslima Nasreen, the controversial Bangladeshi writer, left India last Wednesday for an undisclosed destination in Europe. At London's Heathrow airport, where she was waiting for a connecting flight on Wednesday, she accused the Indian Government of forcing her out. "They are no better than religious fundamentalists," she said. Four months ago, she was hounded out of Kolkata (Calcutta) and put in a safe house in New Delhi that she described as "torture chamber." There she was not allowed to meet anybody, even specialist doctors, despite her serious cardiac condition and retinopathy. Though her visa was extended in February, she had to leave India. A piece on her website blamed India's Foreign Minister and fellow Bengali, Pranab Mukherjee, who "exerted great mental pressure," for her to exit.

Taslima's beginnings in Bangladesh were modest and held little clue to her literary talent. Sexually abused in her adolescence, she became a gynaecologist routinely examining girls who had been raped. This influenced her later writings, and calling herself a "secular humanist," she lashed out against the treatment of women in Islam. Her work, both prose and poetry, that began in the late 1980s became globally renowned in the next decade.

Her fiesty newspaper columns culminated in a book, "Nirbachito Kolam" (Selected Columns), which won her a prestigious award in India in 1992. She then penned about 30 books of novels, short stories, essays and poems, but her fiction, "Lajja" (Shame), in 1995 invited the anger of Muslim fanatics. The book was banned and she had to flee Bangladesh after Islamic groups passed a death sentence on her.

She has been living in various places since then, including Sweden and France. She returned to her country in 1998, but her books, "My Childhood" and "Wild Wind," were not only banned by Bangladesh, but also led to fresh rage and threats against her.

When she eventually sought refugee in Kolkata, saying that the city felt more like home to her, she fell foul of the West Bengal Government, which could not displease a quarter of its population, Muslims. New Delhi proved as terrible.