New Delhi: It's not just writer Taslima Nasreen who earned the wrath of fundamentalists.
Away from intense media glare which Nasreen has always enjoyed since early 1990s, Selina Hossain, another Bangladeshi writer commanding a far higher stature, got an anonymous threat letter from the zealots for flagging in her short stories and novels the issue of exploitation of women in a patriarchal society.
When Hossain Among got congratulatory messages on her being appointed as the head of Bangladesh Children's Academy in May 2014, there was an anonymous letter, which asked her to "behave" like a Muslim woman by wearing a veil.
This is the first time Hossain has let the world know about the threat letter in her article "The Boatman's Wife and Other Short Stories" published in the latest issue of monthly magazine "The Equator Line".
"The anonymous typed letter... Is genderless; it could be either from a man or a woman. But the intention is very clear?to intimidate me," writes Hossain.
However, this was not the first time that Hossain faced the fundamentalists' ire. Way back in 1998, the fundamentalists wrote to the then Prime Minister that she be whipped in public 80 times after her story "Moiram Does not Know what Rape Is" was published.
The furore led to several inquiry committees many of whose members knew the writer personally and she escaped being flogged, according to Hossain.
What has angered the fundamentalists in Hossain's writings is the hard-hitting manner in which she brings out the standing of women and the humiliation they are subjected to in a male-dominated society in which bias and resultant discrimination are deeply ingrained and are denied their sexuality.
What makes Hossain's portrayal of women in this society, through several short stories written in 1990s, so powerful and realistic is that much of it is born out of her personal experience and drawn from everyday life.
The story begins at the writer's own home on the bank of Korotoa river in northern Bangladeshi district of Bogura.
