India, June 7 -- 'When people are fighting for democracy, we should support them.' Marjane Satrapi wrote in a letter to the French government in January 2025, barely six months before Israel bombed her birthplace, Rasht, a city in northern Iran. The US joined Israel's attacks six months later, on the pretext of ushering in democracy, killing Ayatollah Khamenei on February 28, 2026. Iran and the larger West Asia region continues to bleed since then. And Marjane Satrapi has "died of sadness". The celebrated French-Iranian novelist and filmmaker was a hero to at least twogenerations of women, and not just in Iran. It was easy to relate to her dark but delightfully illustrated coming-of-age tale, Persepolis. Sure, not all of us wear hijab or grew up in the fear of being caught by the religious police for doing normal things in normal times, but all of us have certainly felt, at least once in our lives, being treated as worth just half a man. Almost all non-Iranians, whether living under democracies or dictatorships, have understood Iran and the Ayatollah regime intellectually. Never has this been more glaringly obvious than in the present moment. When the US launched its military action against Iran, the lines of public opinion were drawn along the tedious binaries of the good and bad, emancipated and oppressed, West and East, et cetera. People outside Iran raged on public platforms and those within, in whose name these 'freedom' attacks started, kept getting killed by the US, Israel, and Iran governments. Marjane Satrapi embodied this dichotomy. The Iranian regime hated her for exemplifying a freedom they have been most scared of in women. Unfortunately, many of her compatriots, including women whose cause she had been championing through her work, decried her ideas of freedom as belonging to a tone deaf urban elite. And this, in essence, problematises the very ideas of freedom and feminism not just in Iran but also in Turkey, Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh and, of course, India. There are no clear answers to how freedom ought to be defined and understood. Marjane Satrapi, and women like her achieving an almost iconic stature in the intellectual spaces, bear the burden of being scrutinised more closely than their male counterparts. The charge of letting the principles of intersectionality down hounded her. The bubbles of liberalism in Tehran, Istanbul, Kabul and Delhi have the luxury of not being bothered in their everyday lives by the conservatism of the hinterland. The extremism of Konya rarely contaminates the water supply of Istanbul until an Erdogan becomes the mayor of the latter. The urban elite, displaying the arrogance of minor differences, often implodes over figures like Marjane Satrapi. The uneasy feeling over her turning into a cliched emancipated Iranian woman in the West was almost an inevitability. The West used her in self-congratulatory tomes about the virtues of occidental liberalism while the East cast her as the civilisational enemy. In between these extremes sat those who found problems with these 'reception' and 'perceptions' of her life and works. In a quest to intellectualise her, most forgot her corporeal realities. Marjane Satrapi kept reminding us of this in her various interviews. She admitted to not being the cute Marji, the protagonist of Persepolis, anymore. She made it clear, "I'm not in the head of someone who is religious, and I do not, I cannot, judge, and I do not want to give others the permission to judge either." She declared, ".the people that I like are Iranians. My affection is Iranian. And it will always be Iranian. My affection will never become Western." Yet, even the most well-intentioned intellectuals have picked the aspects of her that suits their own attitudes towards Iran and its people. Intersectionality ought to be the strength of any liberal movement, and Marjane Satrapi understood it well while admitting to her limitations. Many of those picking her apart weaponised intersectionality in doing so. Is Marjane dying "of sadness," one year after losing her husband, actor Mattias Ripa, therefore, her final bid to reclaim her personhood at least in death?...