Sushmita Bandhopadhyay was born in 1956, in Calcutta, India (Present day Kolkata). She was a writer and activist from India.
She first met her future husband Janbaz Khan, an Afghan businessman, at a theatre rehearsal in Calcutta[4] and married him on 2 July 1988. She made two abortive attempts to flee Afghanistan. She was caught and held under house arrest. A fatwa was issued against her and she was scheduled to die on 22 July 1995.
When she finally fled, she reached Kabul and took a flight back to Kolkata on 12 August 1995. She lived in India until 2013 and published several books.
Her works include the memoir Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife; 1997) based on her experience of marrying an Afghan and her time in Afghanistan during Taliban rule. The story was used as the basis for the Bollywood film Escape from the Taliban.
According to Afghan police, the suspected Taliban forced entry into her house in Paktika on the night of 4 September 2013. Her corpse was found early the next day on the outskirts of the provincial capital Sharana.
