Why Aatish Taseer feels more Indian after being exiled from India

In late 2019, writer Aatish Taseer found himself abruptly cut off from the country he identified as home. The Indian government revoked his Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card, citing questions over his father’s Pakistani nationality, though many saw it as a punitive response to his outspoken journalism.The cancellation meant he could no longer return to India, almost overnight rendering him “an outsider, an alien, a Pakistani”.“To lose one’s country is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home… without a country we are adrift, like people whose inability to love another is linked to an inability to lose themselves,” he writes in the introduction to his new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Fourth Estate / HarperCollins).The son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and assassinated Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, the writer is no stranger to themes of culture, alienation and questions of nationalism. His debut, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands (2009), a memoir and travelogue, was both a search for an estranged father and coming to terms with the contradictions of modern Islam. His novels, from The Temple-Goers (2010) to The Way Things Were (2014), examined contemporary society and its fraught relationship with its history, culture and politics.Cut loose from India, Taseer plunged headlong into travel, tracing the Silk Road through Uzbekistan, wandering the ruins of Al-Andalus in Spain, crossing the Saharan reaches of Morocco, and journeying through Mongolia’s Buddhist steppes. These journeys, which find themselves in Return to Self, are strong meditations on history’s fault lines, and on the question of what it means to belong. In this interview, Taseer, who lives with his husband in New York, tells us what it was like to find India after leaving it. Edited excerpts:What was it like to travel the world after the Indian government cancelled your OCI? How did that experience reshape your sense of being Indian, and how did it ultimately find its culmination in ‘A Return to Self’?There was an odd sense of euphoria. I felt the world to be so wide and varied, and myself so comfortable within it. I revelled in just the little things about travel: the lunch with a friend at a Black Sea restaurant in Istanbul; the evening connection to Ulaanbataar; the dawn arrival at Chinggis Khaan International; the meeting with Orgil, who had come through a Persian friend’s brother, and then off we went, driving for days across the spine of Asia. It was romantic, to be sure, but there were more serious lines of inquiry. The suppression of Buddhism in Mongolia; its links to an older earth religion; my ability to see these things in the context of other movements in Asia, now in Cambodia, now in China, spoke to a kind of cosmopolitanism (ever a dirty word!) that I felt very proud to possess. I thought, not everyone can do this — and, at a time when I needed encouragement, having been diddled out of a country by those on Raisina Hill, it was a path forward, a way to go on as a writer. Also, odd that it may seem, it reinforced my connection to India. Because, regardless of which passport I was travelling on, I was not travelling as an American, or a Briton, but only as an Indian could, with certain sensitivities that had come down to me through the varied history of India, with all its “inner controversy”. That tradition I was travelling in, which [VS] Naipaul and [Amitav] Ghosh, and others pioneered, shows you who you really are when you are away from home — away, too, from the binary of India and the West. Your nonfiction has always been deeply personal, layered with questions of belonging, culture, and history. Looking back from ‘Stranger to History’ to ‘A Return to Self’, how has your approach to these personal and physical journeys shifted as a writer?My points of reference have multiplied. When I was travelling for Stranger, I just had India and the West. I’m now able to see a new society against the history of two, or three other societies. I’m able to draw lines of comparison and analogy. I’m also very easy with the element of accident and surprise. I don’t need to suppress it to have it fit the frame of my narrative. It’s the equivalent, in a novel, of letting your character do something completely out of character, because you know him or her so well, and because people are not proxies for ideas, and because life is a loose and plotless affair.In the opening essay of your book, you describe how, by 2014, India’s urban elites and the heart of the nation had lost the means to speak to one another. Why did that moment feel to you like the country was finally, and perhaps justifiably, confronting its own truth?It was because what had always felt to me like India’s cultural distances had taken concrete political shape in the advent of Modi. My books until that point, including The Way Things Were, had tried to dramatise those distances, but, until 2014, I felt I was talking into the dark. Probably now we see that what was occurring in India was part of something bigger, a realignment in the world beyond. Sometimes all that is needed is the act of political expression, for people to feel listened to. We make so much of change, but the moments of real change are far fewer than we are prepared to accept. It’s dispiriting, but most of the time history is repetitive and circular, with people behaving in predictable and obsessional ways — more like a bad marriage than a love affair. Do you think India today is closer to an ‘equilibrium’ it was always headed towards? Or has the ‘idea of India’ — as it was once conceived — reached its natural expiry date?In many countries, with similar tensions, we have seen the pendulum swing, again and again. If you define “equilibrium” in the sense of a new political reality finding articulation, then yes, I think to some degree that has occurred. But, if you mean it in the sense of lasting peace, or balance, or even reconfiguration, then no. What really happens in these situations is that different visions of the country vibrate next to each other. It’s an uncomfortable dissonant process, an atonal music, and the most one can hope for is that the different visions are not so deeply incompatible that they tear the place apart. India may be roiling, but it’s in moments like these when we should check to see how intact India’s continuities are — not political continuities, but cultural ones. I think you will find many of them unchanged.Your essays often filter the world through the lens of your Indian upbringing and love for it. If you were to return now, which places and experiences in India would you feel most drawn to revisit or rekindle and why?I don’t feel the draw at all, and I never make a point of revisiting places unless asked to. I like letting memory, accretion and distance accumulate. I will say that the north doesn’t call me at all. On the level of sensual memory, I’m haunted by the south, where I went to school. Of lunches on banana leaves in little roadside restaurants, where they pour ghee onto the rice out of steel buckets. Of bright verdure and garish light, the red dust margin of a thinly metalled road at Dindigul, say. That first breath of the Palani hills. I loved being at school in India. I recently ran into Kai Bird [American author and columnist], who went to Kodai too, and it was amazing to see someone so much older, still full of memory when it came to that place. I keep waiting for homesickness, but it never really comes, except in these very oblique ways. I can’t tell if I’m blocking it, if really one is glad to be away from the bad air and the malice. How often in India we look for pockets of beauty, or exaggerate what would be ordinary elsewhere, in order to make the case to ourselves for why we live there. You have written that losing your ability to return to India also gave you a certain freedom. In a world more interconnected than ever, yet also more insular, what does ‘home’ mean to you today?One of the things I like about America is how much home — no doubt, a carryover of the settler spirit — is an act of doing and making, and not merely inherited belonging. This is true in the narrow sense of the agency required in building, or buying, a home, but it’s also true in the abstract. People hold home to certain standards. Home has to level up. There’s very little mystery; people like to give reasons for why they live where they live. In India, it’s the opposite. Home is the great mother. We are constantly trying to prove ourselves worthy of her, ready to sacrifice, craving authenticity. Every form of comfort — be it ACs, or even the city — is suspect, a betrayal of the idealisation of home. Well, I don’t know if I buy in anymore. I know where I live — it’s my address — but, for the rest, I’m going to let the Great Mother prove herself worthy of me.If one were to find an underlying theme in your essays, it would be the way you explore fraught historical fissures that loom over places — much like India — where the past is as relevant as the present. Why was that so important to you?Yes, I think of my work as primarily being a form of historical reportage, of reporting back from the fault lines or, as you say, the fissures of history. I do it, in part because I grew up along such a line — the Partition, namely, but, more deeply, to paraphrase [James] Baldwin, the war occasioned on the Indian soul by the presence of Islam on the subcontinent. As I travelled more, I found other such fault lines: Shia/Sunni. Pre-Columbian/Hispanic; Shaman/Buddhist; Shinto/Buddhist… the list goes on, but these lines of convulsion matter because their tension can still be felt into the present. They influence politics and human behaviour. In this country, for instance, “the interracial drama” is still so filamental, despite the conceit of America wanting to be a country without history. My role is very neutral, not in the least normative. I don’t try to make history matter when it doesn’t; I’m only interested in dramatising the tension that I can feel in the air. What does [American literary critic] Fredric Jameson say? “History is what hurts.” You once described Imran Khan as a man caught between charisma and contradiction. Today, even from behind bars, he continues to command mass support. Do you see this resilience translating into a genuine chance of political return?Only if he bends — and my fear is that Imran is now someone who will not bend. I remember my father describing an experience of torture in Pakistan. He said, “the mistake they made was that they went too far”. In doing so, they allowed him to tap into a source of inner strength that he did not think he possessed. I fear something similar might have happened in the case of Imran. He has many options, if he is prepared to bend. If he doesn’t, the outcome is almost too terrible to contemplate, but we must be careful not to romanticise it. This country, which, out of its nihilism, demands the sacrifice of those who inspire hope, would have us believe that these people — the Bhuttos, my father — died for something. But this is not true. I remember asking Naipaul if he thought my father died for Pakistan. He replied, “Better to say he died in Pakistan.” It would be the same for Imran. If he dies in prison, he would have died for nothing. Under all the breast-beating and hysteria surrounding the idea of martyrdom in Pakistan, there is nothing but arid futility.Living in the US, you have had a front-row seat to the Donald Trump phenomenon. What strikes you most about his ability to upend institutions that once seemed unshakable?To me, Trump is more interesting as a cultural phenomenon than a political one. He has upended Wyndham Lewis’s idea of America as the “rootless Elysium”. That elastic American idea of belonging, which allowed every variety of hyphenation, and which was so attractive to those in the world beyond, now has the distinct taint of blood-and-soil about it. Perhaps it had always been a fiction, but what a compelling fiction! The pessimism one now feels in America is new. That sense of a world grown old, and full of history. American possibility; American exceptionalism; the role of the country as a moral force in the world — all of these might have been fictions, but they had real traction on the ground. Now nobody even talks about them. That represents what Hannah Arendt describes as “natality”, the arrival of something new in the world. Some people see this as a necessary loss of illusions, but all societies have illusions, and very often they are the engine of perfectibility. In this country, especially, people are so driven by that desire to be better, to not merely be themselves. Fiction or not, I fear we will miss what America made us believe about who and what she was, and may yet be.