The writer, whose OCI card was revoked after a critical essay on Narendra Modi in 2019, on why he felt a sense of relief and freedom after the revocation, and why there is no abstract idea of a homecoming left for him
Aatish Taseer’s relationship with India was severed in a single stroke on November 7, 2019. Days after he wrote a cover story about Prime Minister Narendra Modi in TIME magazine, titled “India’s Divider in Chief,” the Centre revoked his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card. The revocation meant that Taseer was banned in a country he grew up in and had instinctively called home. To be told he was not Indian was to be cast adrift, recast ‘as an outsider, an alien, a Pakistani,’ and forced into the question: what does it mean to belong?
The writer, 44, has always lived between worlds. Born in England to the late Pakistani politician Salman Taseer and the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, raised in New Delhi, educated in Massachusetts, he has spent a career traversing boundaries of culture, and self. His novels — The Temple-Goers (2010), Noon (2011), The Way Things Were (2014) — as well as his two non-fiction works, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009) and The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges (2018), all circle the questions of heritage and belonging.
His latest, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (HarperCollins India), is his most intimate, written in the aftermath of exile. A collection of eight essays, it moves restlessly across Turkey (Istanbul), Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Morocco, Mexico, Spain, Sri Lanka, Bolivia and Iraq. The travel in these essays is never about landscapes alone. It is about the assimilation — not clash — of civilisations, embedded in food, perfume, pilgrimages, politics; it is about the inheritance of a fractured world and the illusions of purity that nations claim for themselves.
Sensual memory as proof of belonging
Taseer’s essays are framed as journeys outward that spiral back inward in what he calls a “return to self.” In the Introduction to the book titled ‘The Demands of Belonging,’ he writes: “If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better belong in India. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home. The strand of elation that runs through them is the simple joy of being out in the world, free of the pressures of belonging. Perhaps there could not have been any other response, given that my country, my material, my world in India, had been snatched from me.”
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In an interview to The Federal, Taseer says, “Belonging, when it is real, does not require articulation. It is a priori true. What the Modi government did was force me to become a petitioner, a man making a case for something as absurd as why one’s name is one’s name.” Did Taseer find the severance altering the way he writes about India? “Not really, no. I felt a tremendous sense of relief and freedom. India is a difficult country to have to belong to, or even care about.”
Taseer remembers VS Naipaul once telling him, “There came a moment in my life when I stopped worrying about India, and it was a great freedom.” He says he understands that now. “My memories of India are mired in traffic, bad air, overcrowding and hysteria. It’s been wonderfully relaxing to be away. Of his American exile, Arthur Schoenberg once said, ‘I was driven into paradise.’ I feel much the same way,” he says.
In a concrete sense, India is a very small aspect of A Return to Self. “It is the distillation of my Indian concerns, about syncretism and historical convulsion, that are the true substance of this book, and these are explored in societies other than India. It is the ghost of India, rather than India itself, that hangs over this book,” Taseer says.
The essays constantly juxtapose national identity with the scent of the soil Taseer spent many years in, its architecture, and its cuisine. What do these sensory and cultural elements capture about belonging that political language never can? “The nation-state, especially in the post-colonial world, is so feeble an expression of culture and civilisation. One of the motivations of this book is to restore sympathy and wonder, not just to travel, but also to our sense of self,” he underlines.
“The India, where one might be sitting under a tree, and a dog would wander up, was part of an invincible India within her that the politics of the modern state could never corrupt,” Taseer recollects what writer Kiran Desai told him once. “How true that is! Those deeper ways of feeling, related to sensual memory, are so much more valid as proof of belonging than anything so tacky as a passport, or an OCI for that matter,” he adds.
Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish Taseer made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century.
In the essays, Taseer writes about the “palimpsest” nature of place: layers of history over one spot. Did his own layered heritage ever feel like a burden to reconcile, or has it always been a resource for seeing the world’s layers more clearly? “Never a burden. I love the world in all its complexity. I love the history of an old configuration pushing through another. I love multiplicity and variety. I love hybrid languages, like Urdu and Aljamiado, which was the language of the Moriscos, a romance language written in the Arabic script. I’m never in search of resolution when I travel. My aim only and ever is to dramatize complexity.”
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Taseer alludes to cultures speaking “through” each other, as with the West expressing itself through Eastern perfumery. Does he see such acts as enrichment, appropriation, or something more ambiguous, and does that ambiguity mirror his own experience of cultural inheritance? “I see them as inevitable forms of cultural expression. For a long time, the traffic was moving in only one direction. Europeans were expressing themselves by othering us. More and more, it’s a two-way street. We, in India, now use the West all the time to express things about ourselves. (One has only to watch a Karan Johar’s movie to see how we, too, are capable of turning the West into a backdrop!)”
‘India doesn’t have the energy to tear itself apart’
In exploring places like Mexico, Turkey, and Sri Lanka, Taseer notes parallels with India’s anxieties about authenticity. Does he see nationalism today as a global contagion, each instance feeding off the others, or are these anxieties rooted in each place’s unique historical trauma? “No, I actually think we’re living through nationalism in its death throes. These frantic assertions of national identity are a reaction to the deep internationalism of our world now.”
“We all read the same newspapers, watch the same films, share the same social media, travel to the same places: we are constantly being assaulted by the experience of seeing others, and being seen by others. It is profoundly unsettling, and one of the ways we banish the complexity of the world we now live in, is by taking refuge in the simplifying frame of national belonging,” states the author, who lives in New York with his husband, lawyer Ryan Davis, whom he met in the summer of 2014.
In India under Modi, we’ve seen a growing tension between the idea of “Bharat” rooted in a majoritarian past, and “India” as a plural, constitutional promise. From his vantage point in exile, does Taseer see this as a passing political phase, or the remaking of the nation’s very soul? How does that struggle complicate his own sense of belonging? “It’s a phase, the passing hysteria of a new kind of person expressing himself or herself in India. The truth is that it’s very difficult to remake a country’s soul as you say,” he says.
Aatish Taseer's 2014 novel, The Way Things Were, is centered on the pressures of history upon the present moment, set at flashpoints in 1975, 1984, 1992 and in modern Delhi.
Before 2019, Taseer was travelling extensively in India for In Search of India’s Soul: From Mughals to Modi, the Al Jazeera documentary. “What everyone could not help but notice was how unsegregated India was on the ground level, casbah to casbah. This country, the United States, feels much more segregated. 170 million+ Muslims, threaded through every region of India! I don’t think India has the energy required to tear itself apart,” says Taseer.
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“What generally happens in these situations is that something that required articulation — a cultural, or historical grievance — gets articulated, and the fever breaks. Then there is some respite, and the cycle repeats. It is a testament to India’s relative youth, as a modern nation, that people believe meaningful change is still possible. The sad truth is that after ten years or more of Modi we’ve seen most of what we’re going to see. What will be harder to bear is the loss of illusions afterwards. What is that line from Lampedusa? It’s not so much that you do good, or bad; the important thing is to do nothing,” he adds.
The precarity of life in New York
The right-wing troll army had targeted Taseer with a vengeance after the TIME piece. They vandalized his Wikipedia page, issued death threats, and posted memes of him with a Pakistani eyepatch. Does Taseer resist the Pakistani label? Beyond the obvious political baggage, what does being Indian offer him emotionally or culturally that being Pakistani does not? “I also resist the label of Bangladeshi, or Cambodian, or Cameroonian for that matter. What have I got to do with Pakistan? I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to that country. And no, it was not a pleasant experience,” he retorts.
“All it gave me was murder, fanaticism, prejudice and malice. It was like India, but without any of the redeeming features. I like Pakistan when it’s being Punjab, or Sindh, or wonderful Balochistan, but, when it’s being a Pakistan, it feels like a historical deformity, the sound of one hand clapping,” he adds.
To those who think Taseer was born into privilege, had homes, resources, and mobility, he asks: “What privilege? I had a single mother, who was virtually destitute. I had an absent father and a brutish Hindu fanatic stepfather. None of these people have ever given me anything. Some of them are dead; the country is gone; the class I belonged to (which was privileged, in that it was genteel and educated) has been overthrown. It’s all jackals and hyenas now.”
The only safety net he has, Taseer says, is the little life he has built with his husband, “which feels precarious enough.” He says: “In India, even among the poor, there are bonds of community, family and tribe. Here there’s nothing. One of us — either my husband, or me — will die first, and then the other will be left utterly alone, with some meagre savings at best. Then what? A home, if we can afford it. Dementia, disease, death? I don’t know, but I’ve seen it play out in my building a few times, and it’s pretty grim, I can tell you.”
He wonders what his “privilege” is going to amount to then? In a response that breaks your heart, he asks: “Am I going to tell the man who comes to take me away in scrubs that ‘back home, in a country you’ve never heard of, in a time now long gone, my mother and father used to be somebody.’”
At home in the world
Looking back, does Taseer see his TIME magazine article on Modi as a necessary act of speaking truth, an avoidable miscalculation, or simply the moment when the personal and political became inseparable for him? Taseer minces no words: “I can’t write with someone on my back. Everything I do, whether it’s journalism, a novel, a translation (he has translated the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto), absorbs me completely and requires the full sum of my energies. The writer’s job is only to be responsible for the quality of the work. If some thug, sitting half a world away, sends his minions after me because he doesn’t like what I’ve written — well, it’s just not my concern.”
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He says he has always known that writing has consequences. “The first writer I ever met, aged seven, was Salman Rushdie, months before he went into hiding. The spectre of fanaticism has haunted me all my life. My father, poor man, was killed by a fanatic. My upbringing in India was, as Amos Oz says, a study in comparative fundamentalism. Now we have this boor on Raisina Hill. I can’t propose to enter his head. I don’t know the contents of his black little heart. My concern is to not let him, or anyone else, put me out of business,” he says.
Taseer’s concern, he makes it clear, is to keep working. “I’m not especially attached to my TIME Magazine piece – journalism lives in the nether regions of my internal hierarchy — nor am I full of regret or apology. I don’t wake up thinking of Modi, or India, or my OCI. If I cared less, I would be dead,” he asserts.
In A Return to Self, politics is present but never dominant. Was that a conscious choice to resist being defined by a single political confrontation, or an acknowledgment that politics can never fully explain the emotional truth of exile? “I’m not really interested in politics, except when it becomes the vessel of cultural or historical longing,” says Taseer, adding, “These days politics everywhere is infused with that underlying energy. My aim in each of these pieces, when politics arises, is to lift the hood and to give the reader an insight into one of those nodal points of historical tension that imbue the politics of a country with a special energy.”
According to Taseer, Turkish autocrat president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Rajapaksas, Modi and Donald Trump, are all “emanations of a deeper convulsion.” He says: “I’m not interested in whether they’re going to win the next election or not; I’m interested in what they represent, the ‘inner controversy’ of which they are a distillation.”
Does Taseer think that exile is a permanent state — once begun, does it reshape the self irreversibly? — or is there still, somewhere, the possibility of a homecoming? “The ‘return’ to self is a fait accompli, well before the book was written. It is to feel at home in the world. The euphoria and wonder that run through the book are the emotions associated with the return.”
He adds: “The book, except in the introduction, is not concerned with the mechanism of return. It is rather a turning of one’s back on the place that shrank my curiosities — India, namely — that made me smaller than I was, that left me hankering after an idea of home that was oppressive rather than freeing. I am at home in the beginning of the book and no, there is no abstract idea of a homecoming left for me. I come home every day when I walk through my front door. And that is all there is.”
