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Abstract
Taslima Nasrin is known as one of the most powerful voices in the literary canon of the Bangladeshi English literature and her best known work Lajja is considered as a good example of identity crisis. In this novel, the identity crisis is faced by Hindu minority in Bangladesh. Before moving on to discuss the novel, one should have some information about the novelist, Taslima Nasrin. Taslima Nasrin was born in 1962 in Bangladesh, the then East Pakistan. She is a Bangladeshi doctor cum author who has been living in exile since 1994. Early in her literary career, she wrote mainly poetry and published poems focusing chiefly on the female oppression. She shifted to prose in the early 1990s and wrote three collections of essays and four novels before 1993. In 1993, she wrote Lajja which represents a cross- section of Bangladesh after a long time of partition from Indian sub-continent. For this novel, she had to face the wrath of the Islamic fundamentalists. A fatwa was issued against her and she was forced to leave her mother land and spend the rest of her life on a foreign land like India, Sweden and France. The reasons behind this exile were the burning issues that she has raised in the novel. Some of these issues were identity crisis, religious and cultural conflicts, issues on linguistic grounds, mass killing of Hindu families and violence against women, especially Hindu women. Another reason behind this problematic situation was that she herself is a Muslim woman. She is from a majority community and speaks against the fundamentalist attitudes and behaviour of her community. This seems indigestible to Islamic fundamentalists and it uses all its powers to silent her voice. She received life threats and her book was also banned. But the result came the opposite of the general expectations. She emerged as a stronger voice than before and now a day, Lajja is cited as a perfect example by those who work on the issue of identity crisis, identity conflict and identity politics. The paper aims to assess the destruction of identity of a particular community in Bangladesh with the backdrop of the demolition of the Babri masjid in India. The reasons behind the emergence of the identity crisis will also be discussed.