Aatish Taseer: The Eternity of Return

The broad strokes of author and journalist Aatish Taseer’s life are well known. Son of journalist mother Tavleen Singh and Pakistani politician father Salman Taseer, he was raised by his mother in India. His father, whom he first met when he was 21, was assassinated in 2011. In 2019, Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) was revoked, purportedly because of his critical coverage of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which means he can never return to his country of origin.

Given his life’s arc, exile for Taseer is not a concept, it is a lived reality. Exile means he could not return to India when his grandmother—in whose house he’d grown up, the person he was closest to after his mother—died. Unable to attend her funeral he had to make do with a meal at an Indian restaurant with his husband in New York, fully aware of the absurdity of this substitution. Exile for him is both geographical and personal. It was estrangement from his father. It was hiding his sexuality. It was leading a double life. The 44-year-old pulls these various personal threads into his seventh and most recent book, a collection of essays, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Fourth Estate; 205 pages; Rs 499).

In A Return to Self the self is a thread and not the weave. Taseer’s concerns go far beyond the personal; he is invested in the larger questions of history and geography—what is remembered, what is forgotten, who is the ‘other’, and what is ‘authentic’. The essays travel from Istanbul to Morocco to Sri Lanka to Iraq. In each of these places he examines not only what is, but what was. In these different locations scattered around the globe, Taseer often uses a single motif as an entry point—in Sri Lanka it is the lotus, in Mexico it is rice. He maps the ebbs and flows of history, the “anxiety about authenticity” by following the many trails of these objects. In essay after essay, he reminds us of the perils of terms like ‘invasive’ and ‘native’, which are most often used to build fences and exclude. Taseer, who identifies as a humanist, underscores the importance and richness of “encounters with the Other”.

In an article ‘Behind the Story: How a Writer Prepared for a 40,000-Mile Trip’ (New York Times Style Magazine) one glimpses the preparation and labour that these trips entail. For his three-part article on pilgrimage that took him to Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq, he read or referred to close to 20 books for each of these destinations. It is this rigour of research coupled with shoe-leather reporting that allows him to capture “the wounds of the past reverberating into the present,” and to chronicle “societies still recovering from historic cataclysms.”

Taseer has a knack for the acute and moving description. For example, when writing of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, he notes, “The buildings stood, redolent of a certain life—I could almost hear the happy commotion of a caravan town—but, to be in the centre of Bukhara was an isolating, solitary experience, like being in an amusement park after closing time.”  To read this is not only to see a city atrophied of life, but it is also to glimpse the desolation of imagined empty roller coasters, motionless swings and shuttered candy shops. It is to see a city as a museum for tourists, and not as a dwelling for residents.

One pitfall of a collection of essays, especially those that have been published before, is repetition. If one were to read A Return to Self as a book, a reader will often find facts repeating. In different essays one will encounter the same personal background information, which interrupts one’s reading pleasure. But beyond that mild irritant, these are essays that transport a reader to elsewheres only to return her to her own self.

WHEN TASEER AND I speak, he is in Accord, less than two hours from New York City. Wikipedia says the population of this hamlet is less than 600. Here Taseer has made a home with his husband Ryan Davis to whom A Return to Self is dedicated. After his globe-trotting, he returns home to his husband, their dog, bookshelves and a vegetable garden that has just fruited a bumper crop of peppers and tomatoes. It is here that he has found his moorings, and while he’d earlier been petrified of dying in America, it is here that he has come to acknowledge that maybe he has enough, and the life that he has made, and the home that they’ve created matters more than the past.

His mother, Tavleen Singh, is a well-known journalist, and she makes a few cameo appearances in the book as well. Taseer believes that while she has not influenced his writing, she has moulded his curiosities. He still remembers listening to her read her news dispatches over the phone to an editor at the Sunday Times. As a child with an excellent memory, he would often be able to recite the same columns verbatim. Thanks to his mother he became political early. He says, “A lot of people have been radicalised by Instagram and they are kind of fraudulently political. But I felt very deeply political from a very early age.” It is a politics that believes in cultural assimilation, which warns against limpieza de sangre, or cleansing of the blood, a politics that defies the dehumanisation of certain communities, and a politics that cherishes many histories and various cultures, and which stands up for the weak.

The essays in the book were built in collaboration with Hanya Yanagihara, editor-in-chief of T Magazine (of the New York Times) and the author of A Little Life. They have never met but share a unique “epistolary relationship”, where she often sends him on assignments, which might seem random at first, but then sync perfectly with his interests, such as the Islamic past of Spain. The essays in this collection were chosen because of their common theme. Taseer says, “These particular essays were included because they keep circling around the same concerns—syncretism, historical convulsion, this feeling of the past reverberating into the present.” He adds, “I work with Hanya almost in a way where certain limits are placed on you, but those limits don’t hinder your creativity. They help you. It’s like writing a sonnet, you have to stick to the form. But within that form, there’s a freedom.”

The opening essay on Istanbul titled ‘A Return to Self’ poignantly captures the remaking of Istanbul and Taseer’s own battles with identity. The city becomes the site of his reckonings. He’d visited the Turkish capital as an aspiring writer of 25, and he returned a few weeks short of 40, with six books to his name. The 25-year-old and the 40-year-old could well be two different people. The young man was still deeply closeted and while dating a woman was also secretly visiting the hamams and cavorting with men. He says, “It’s very easy to deviate from a truer self. And I was very much that person in Istanbul.” With time came acceptance, and an embrace of the authentic self.

The phrase ‘return to self’ aptly captures Taseer’s concerns. He first heard it being used by Ali Shariati, an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist, who used it in the context of returning to the self after a colonial experience. Taseer employs it in a different context. He explains, “I was using it in the sense that I felt like the post-colonial state made these very narrow demands on the individual. And it was a very jealous master, and it asked you to conform to fixed ideas of nationality and belonging. And after that stuff with the OCI and this feeling of not being able to actually come back to India, the return to self for me was a return to a bigger frame of curiosity, of belonging, of inquiry, of allowing oneself to develop in a way free of that ball and chain.”

Taseer has the author’s ability to approach a topic from different angles, which makes him an apt surgeon of the muscle and sinew of life. When the OCI was revoked, Taseer who is familiar with Urdu, Hindi and Sanskrit, felt cheated, even bereft. But then another emotion raised its head too and that was relief. It was akin to the relief of not being his father’s son any longer. He had always felt trapped by certain expectations of ‘Indianness’, whether this was in accent or demeanour or ideology. He didn’t ‘sound like an Indian’, he was ‘too formal’ to be an Indian, he wasn’t Hindu enough, he wasn’t Sikh enough. Suddenly he was free of all these obligations. He says, “These obligations are the enemy of individuality, which is much stranger, and which develops in more surprising ways. And I’ve always felt these things have ambushed me. I always felt there was a self that I was trying to protect from these obligations. And being Indian is a very, very intense obligation. And then one day you don’t have to try. One day it’s gone. And that was the relief I felt.”

For Taseer, the idea of exile, of an outsider searching for belonging is more universal than exceptional. His state of exile is as common (or uncommon) as a migrant labourer from Kerala working in the Gulf. He says, “The sort of exile or dislocation I’ve experienced, people are experiencing that in vast quantities on the Indian border at the moment.” While the experience is not unique, what an author brings to it is interpretation.  He adds, “What writers do, if anything is perhaps, they allow people to find a locus, or a venue, or a vessel, in which the people who’ve had these experiences can feel understood. I think that, perhaps, is the writer’s job—to write into this kind of experience. Writing still remains the one way in which that experience can really be captured and people can feel listened to.”

As a cosmopolitan travelling the world, who is more invested in “tracing the outline of places that have ceased to exist”, Taseer finds travels “melancholic” rather than romantic. Rooted in Indian reality, he is always aware of the workings of power and authority, of erasure and memory. He says, “India to me is like that great crucible. Where so many streams of thought, of religion, of cultural power, of political power, all of these things have coalesced. And having grown up there, I have these different lines—these vectors that I’m pursuing. When I’m travelling, I try to make people aware that the shape of the world is not necessarily as fixed as it seems.”

For now, Taseer is tending his home garden. But soon enough he will set off for his next trip, to peel away another lost land. His next journey is likely to take him East, to Nepal, Thailand and East Asia in the fading footsteps of Buddhism.

A Return to Self: Excursions in ExileAatish Taseerbookscultural powerhistorical convulsioninterviewpolitical powersyncretism