Jane Austen She's Not

By Paul Gray

If those mobs in Dhaka howling for Taslima Nasrin's head had ever read her books, they might really be angry. What, for example, would they make of:

When a dog is chasing you, be warned.

That dog has rabies.

When a man is chasing you, be warned.

That man has syphilis.

This verse may be more nuanced and lyrical in the original Bengali, but the English translation conveys qualities that even most of Nasrin's supporters in Bangladesh readily concede: she is very angry, not given to nice distinctions, eager to shock and unconcerned with turning fine phrases.

Thanks to her enemies, Nasrin has become a cause celebre in a West almost totally ignorant of her writings. About the only place to experience her firsthand is in her novel Shame, published in India and translated into English. The expanded version of a novella-length work first issued in early 1993, Shame tells the story of the Dutta family -- father Sudhamoy, mother Kironmoyee, son Suranjan and daughter Nilanjana -- Bangladeshi Hindus caught up in a wave of Muslim reprisals shortly after the December 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu zealots in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya.

"I detest fundamentalism and communalism," Nasrin announces in her preface, and that is about as subtle as Shame ever gets. Even though they have lived there for generations, the Duttas seem to have dropped into Bangladesh from Mars, so alien does the specter of sectarian violence from neighboring Muslims strike them. "Why was his motherland turning her back on him?" Suranjan wonders, lolling in bed. Only Nilanjana displays some apprehension of reality: "She was thinking that no one seemed to realize that something had to be done before something awful happened to all of them."

Shame is stuffed with such slack reasoning and prose. But bad writers deserve the same freedoms as good ones. If, as is to be hoped, Nasrin gets out of her troubles, she may even prove that persecution is a smart career move.