A good part of writer Aatish Taseer’s life was spent in India, where he lived for 30 years. In 2019, his connection to the country was cut short when the Indian government revoked his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), a visa granted to foreign nationals of Indian origin who were citizens of India on January 26, 1950, or thereafter or were eligible to become citizens of India on January 26, 1950 except who is or had been a citizen of Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Taseer suddenly found himself in “exile” after what he recalls as the fallout from a cover story, titled ‘India’s Divider In Chief’, he had written for Time magazine. In his book A Return To Self: Excursions In Exile (Harper Collins), he writes about a journey of rediscovery across different parts of the world in the wake of that turning point.
Excerpts from a conversation with the author:
What made you write this book and why did you name it name it A Return To Self?
The title is drawn from the Iranian cleric, Ali Shariati’s response to [philosopher] Frantz Fanon—that after an experience of colonisation, there is a rediscovery of one’s cultural self. For me, it meant the rediscovery of the individual self after one was set free from the demands the post-colonial state makes on belonging. In India, specifically, I had felt so much pressure to simplify myself to belong better in India. Many of my natural curiosities, whether related to travel in West Asia, or French literature, had been sacrificed at the altar of a somewhat odious binary between India and the West. Living in India, provincialised me. I lost the ability to travel in parts of the world I had been so much at ease in when I was 25. After being banned from the country, I felt a unexpected sense of relief and freedom. It was a moment that coincided with the travelling I did for this book. And it was that strain of euphoria at being out in the world again that felt like a return to self.
How has your understanding of “home” or “identity” evolved since your earlier works like Stranger to History?
It’s grown much narrower, more granular. My idea of home is the little life I have built with my husband and our chocolate lab in New York. In the past, I was full of abstract ideas of home, related to country, culture and civilisation. India revels in abstractions, often at the cost of the concrete and the physical. In cities that look like slums, we dream of renaissance! Sometimes it’s better just to fix the roads, and pick up the garbage , before fantasising about cultural rebirth.
How do you decide what to withhold and what to reveal, especially in a work so personal? What were some of the challenges you faced while documenting your experiences in countries across the world?
It’s a very instinctive process. I have certain concerns that have been formed over many years of reading and thinking. Out in the world, confronted on many occasions by societies I’m travelling in for the first time, I like to use novelty and unfamiliarity as a way to bring the reader in. I’m not interested in assumed knowledge, or in playing the expert. I try instead to replicate in the writing the experience of discovery during travel, whether on the level of people, reading, or observation. That transparency is very important to me.
In one of the chapters, you quote German journalist Sebastian Haffiner’s Defying Hitler: “If one loses [one’s own country], one almost loses the right to love any other country.” How does this sentence outline your relationship with India?
It speaks to an aspect of belonging that is a priori. It is something one should be allowed to take for granted. What the government did to me was they turned me into a supplicant, an outsider, someone who had to prove the right to belong. But no one should have to deal with their own country in that way. The beauty of belonging is that it is implicit. It is what allows you to journey away from your place, as well as to look critically at it. I remember Arif Mohammad Khan, during the filming of In Search of India, telling me, “If someone tells you your father is not your father, you tell him to go to hell.” But that is exactly what was done to me...I just had to go away, with that Coriolanus-like rage that “there is a world elsewhere.”
Do you feel closer to the self you were searching for when you began writing this?
I don’t know if the process is so much one of “feeling closer” as it is of seeing better. The one implies a kind of finality, whereas curiosity, or inquiry, are never-ending. I do feel, however, that my ability now to balance many societies in my head at once has sharpened and clarified my way of looking.