A Return to Self
Excursions in Exile
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A blend of travelog and memoir spanning from Turkey to Mexico, exploring Aatish Taseer’s uniquely blended identity and asking: Why do certain cities become epicenters of great historical shifts and sites of unpredictable communities?
In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi revoked Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity, and asking broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and a nationality, in the process.
In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist façade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated there, is so little practiced. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?
In thoughtful prose that combines reportage with romanticism, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes an unstable, politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and gets to the human heart of the shifts and migrations that define our multicultural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exquisite collection of travel dispatches, memoirist and novelist Taseer (The Dog of Tithwal) reflects on his relationship to place, what it means to be cut off from one's home, and what leads to the formation of national identity and the rise of nationalism. At the outset, Taseer, who was born in Britain but raised in India and was a dual citizen of both countries, relates how in 2019 India's government revoked his citizenship after he wrote an article critical of Prime Minister Narenda Modi. The government's pretext was that Taseer had "concealed the Pakistani origins of my father" (an "odd accusation" because Taseer had written multiple books and essays about his father, the former governor of Punjab). This experience of bizarre, identity-based targeting by a nationalist government causes Taseer to begin to see his travels—which were commissioned by T magazine—in a new light. He becomes increasingly attuned to the palimpsest nature of place—with multiple identities and time periods layered over one spot—as well as the interconnectedness of the world at any given time. For instance, he finds Turkey in the throes of a nationalist wave deeply similar and seemingly directly connected to developments in India. Meanwhile in Mexico, he encounters similarities not borne of modern connections, but of a long-ago identitarian movement, the Reconquista, when Spain expelled its Muslim and Jewish populations. Sumptuously written and elegantly observed, this is a stunning and immersive vision of a fully interdependent world.
