The complexity of identity, belonging and memory forms the central theme of Aatish Taseer’s book, A Return to Self. Spanning from Turkey to Mexico and written as part travelogue and part memoir, the book explores how certain cities become the epicentres of great historical shifts. Walking through the lanes and bylanes of these cities also takes the author on a journey within. The parallel journeys explore broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and identity.
In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship, exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for 30 years. Taseer, in the introduction of the book, writes, “The pretext the government used was that I had concealed the Pakistani origins of my father. It was an odd accusation. I had written a book, Stranger to History, and published many articles about my father, despite being estranged from him for most of my life.”
Taseer’s loss, both practical and spiritual, sets the tone of the book. Losing his citizenship did not come easy. He says, “To lose one’s country is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home.” However, after the initial shock and shame, Taseer felt, unexpectedly, relieved. “The burden of trying to fit into India, of forever apologising for its shortcomings, apologising for my own Westernisation, was suddenly lifted from me. The West, in turn, was no longer some dirty secret that I could enjoy only at the detriment of the ‘real’ India. It was all I had. I was home.”
It is a compilation of Taseer’s travel essays, earlier published in T Magazine after the Indian government revoked his OCI status. The author’s journey through these places is a continuous conversation on dissecting identity. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist façade. Witnessing flux and continuity in the streets of Uzbekistan, the author questions concepts of ownership, address and belonging.
Travelling with locals gave the author a deeper insight into the places he visited. Calling Uzbekistan “a land of many faiths, producing an unstable system of values” tells the reader that under the veneer of modernity, conservative values still prevail.
In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: amid the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing ideological battles around the world.
Fascinating characters from his encounters appear in the book. In Taroudant, he was invited by the last Persian empress in exile, Farah Pahlavi, “still radiant at 80, with black ribbons in her gold hair and corals on her neck,” who has a home there, for “a wonderful dinner, full of friends and family, where talk would turn inexorably to exile and revolution and elites pushed out of countries that were changing too fast.” At Erdene Zuu, Mongolia’s oldest surviving monastery, he met a herder from the Inner Mongolia region of China, who had come at political peril on pilgrimage not just for the Buddha but also for Genghis Khan. “I wanted to receive the particular energy of this man here, in what was the capital of the Mongol Empire and of Buddhism,” she told him.
With great command of language, the writing explores the beauty and diversity of varied cultures. But it subtly touches upon the politics of those nations. The political tone of the book makes Taseer sound more like a writer than a journalist. However, the chapter on Iraq brings back that curiosity in his writing.
Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes an unstable, politicised vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and gets to the human heart of the shifts and migrations that define our multicultural world. The details can be exhausting, but the book will keep you hooked nonetheless.