Aatish Taseer on exile and identity in his new book ‘A Return to Self’

In a public conversation in Kolkata in 2010, writer and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was asked if she would describe herself as a “cosmopolitan”. To which, like any erudite Bengali public intellectual of her generation, she gave a fitting reply. “I fall into a place and I become of that place,” Spivak said. “I feel sometimes, when someone asks me the question, that I have roots in air… I am at home everywhere and I am not at home anywhere. It seems to me when one is at home, the place where one is at home has no name.”

In new-age jargon, this statement may sound like the very definition of “digital nomadism”. But the instinct to be rootless and unhomed has a long, complex and intensely human history. As Aatish Taseer puts it in his new book of travel-essays, A Return to Self, “To never settle was to never be softened by the idea of home.” He is referring here to “the nomadic life of the steppe” during his visit to Uzbekistan, but the idea recurs through the collection, becoming especially poignant for the literal force with which it has come true in the writer’s own life.

In 2019, the government revoked Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status and forced him into a seemingly permanent exile from the country he grew up in. A British citizen by birth, he had been educated in India and the United States, where he eventually settled down with his husband, Ryan Davis, a lawyer. It was his Pakistani parentage—Taseer’s father was Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab, who was assassinated in 2011 for defending a victim of blasphemy—that became the lynchpin behind cancelling his OCI.

Since then, Taseer has grieved the passing of his grandmother—who brought him up since he was two years old—long distance. Denied entry into the country he not only called home but also wrote several books about, he has been able to meet his elderly mother only abroad. But exile has also freed him from the burden of expectations—it has allowed him to wander the world with no obligation to fulfil any pact of fidelity. “If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return to my natural curiosities and… cosmopolitanism,” he writes in the Introduction, “after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better belong in India.”

Tasser writes beautifully about the places he ventures into—Turkey, Morocco, Spain, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Mongolia—conjuring up the sights, smells and tastes of faraway nations with sensuous acuity. But his gift truly comes through in the act of (what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called) “thick description”—a form of ethnographic study that is richly textured, multilayered and informed by an awareness of the myths and symbols that lie at the heart of other cultures. To occupy such a vantage point is to continuously expose oneself to the pulls and pushes of reality; it involves, as Taseer writes in the chapter on Istanbul, “living in a perpetual state of cultural whiplash.”

By this logic, if the novelty of travel lies in the attraction to the unknown, it also involves an act of active witnessing—to see things that are no longer there, to acknowledge a recurrent feeling of deja vu and, especially in Taseer’s case, to contrast the present against a portrait of the past as recorded by writers before him.

Thus, Taseer’s description of the time he spends at the Hagia Sophia mosque, which was formerly a church, in Istanbul, becomes an arch reminder of parallels close to home—the age-old political game of reclaiming and rebuilding masjids as mandirs. These are not epiphanies relevant to India alone.

As Taseer walks around Seville in Spain, he is reminded of the rich multiplicity of faiths that once coexisted in the Castilian community. On the tomb of the sainted king Ferdinand III, he discovers plaques “in all the four languages of medieval Spain—Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and Castilian,” a shocking contrast to the brutal erasure of non-Christian religions later on.

How does a place, Taseer wonders, “so steeped in diversity come unstuck? What makes a society succumb to the primal cry for a ‘purity of blood’?”

It’s a question that haunts people in many parts of the world today. Taseer seeks to find his own answers by putting himself out in the unfamiliar worlds—be it by braving subzero temperatures in Mongolia, or by joining hordes of pilgrims headed to the festival of Our Lady of Copacabana in Bolivia, or by setting off on a lotus trail in Sri Lanka to uncover the complex semiotics of the flower in the island nation’s social, religious and political life.

Taseer’s prose, however, gains its most vivid potency in his imaginings of pasts that no traveller can access any longer. Perhaps they can only sense the contours of those bygone times—if they know where, and how, to look for it. Like Marco Polo narrating the stories of his travels to “invisible cities” to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s classic novel of the same name, Taseer, too, is seeking a place that only lives on in the imagination. As he puts it, “increasingly I find the wonder of travel lies less in the discovery of new places than in tracing the outline of those that have ceased to exist.”