‘A Return to Self’: Aatish Taseer’s memoir of world travel reflects the enigmas of today’s India

For much of his younger years, writer and essayist Aatish Taseer had been plagued by the thought of not being sufficiently Indian. Although he was born in England, Taseer was raised largely in India, behind the ramparts, as it were – those walled-off spaces where the Indians imbued with Western values live at an arm’s length from the rest of their compatriots, perpetuating the chasm between the elite and the plebeian that continues to be a duality of India to this day.

Conscious of being estranged from the forms of living that embodied the country’s original spirit, Taseer made attempts to (over)compensate for it. He learned the classical Indian languages, visited the shrines and temples dotting the country, and travelled as far afield from the comforts of his cocooned life as possible, and even hid his sexuality as a young gay man.

But these noble efforts at understanding the young nation’s paradoxes and peculiarities, not as a supercilious outsider but as an affectionate participant, an equal, came unstuck. In 2019, just months into his second term, the BJP administration revoked his OCI status. Taseer’s banishment came on the heels of his article in TIME magazine in which he blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an upsurge of Hindu nationalism at the expense of the country’s historical pluralism.

The decision was cheered on by a large number of Modi’s zealous advocates, their merry-making redolent of the same mocking texture that defined the outburst of mirth across neighbouring Pakistan, where the assassin of Taseer’s father, Salman Taseer, was showered with rose petals. The senior Taseer, a high-profile governor, was guilty of sympathising with a Christian woman falsely accused of blasphemy.

A new journey

Six years later, Taseer’s new book A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile captures his moment of relief when he realises his banishment had broken him free of having to straitjacket himself to produce an “illusion of the idea of home.” The book comprises essays that Taseer had authored over the years for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where he is a writer at large.

His travels through countries such as Spain, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Mexico restore in him the ethic of cosmopolitanism that allows one to see the world beyond the parochial gaze of nationalism and religion. For instance, Taseer’s conversations about sexuality in Turkey with Eyüp Özer, a former Marxist student, reveal to us the futility of prioritising “grand abstractions before concrete ideas of personal freedom and happiness.”

Like India, Turkey’s polity, too, is hostage to authoritarian tendencies, with a hard layer of despotism floating over the broader public yearnings for freedom. His recollections of joining a gay club in Istanbul, where men in “white briefs and shaved bodies” are making out, uncover a secret world of people indulging in liberties in snatches, right underneath the unmindful glare of a Praetorian state.

Further, the sojourns through the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan reveal a society alchemised in the crucible of multiple worlds on the Silk Road: Sassanian, Abbasid, Mongolian and Timurid. As they walk past the Timurid-era monuments, the hulking bricolages of glazed tiles and honeycomb muqarnas, Taseer’s Uzbek guide gestures to this historical syncretism, “There’s no such thing as our style,” responding to his query about the stylistic origins of a pillared portico of a mosque in Bukhara.

“Three thousand years ago, we were invaded by Persians, so we have something from Persia; fifteen hundred years ago, we were invaded by the Arabs, so we have something from the Arabs; one thousand years ago, we were invaded by the Mongols, so we have something from them,” he adds. This statement comes as a sharp riposte to the notions of historical purity, the brutal manifestations of which abound in India, where a quest for autochthonous traditions unsullied by the Muslim conquests has been feeding into the rising religious chauvinism.

The chapter on Islamic Spain, besides being an unforgettable treatise on the Muslim history of the Iberian Peninsula, is also a fine example of Taseer’s literary genius, his peerless felicity with prose. This exploration hammers home an important point for Taseer: “When a majoritarian atmosphere takes hold in a society, no concession is ever enough.”

Once a thriving Islamic emirate in Europe, Spain was emptied of its Muslim presence through the methodical application of violence. In 1492, Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Spain, set sail with Christopher Columbus in search of America. On his way out, he cast a sorrowful look upon the topaz-hued vistas of Granada city, the coarse limestone walls of its buildings offering a sharp relief against the deep grey, cobbled avenues.

Ringed by the rolling hills of the Sierra Nevada, Granada’s magnificent Islamic past is embodied in multi-foiled arches of alternating red and white voussoirs on which the many Moorish mosques of Spain stand. Under Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand III of Aragon, Spain “established a political skeleton in which religion was given the first position”, which became a precursor for the Inquisition, characterised by “book burnings, autos-da-fe, and crypto-identities.”

As Taseer writes, “To destroy a people, one has to first dehumanise them. One has to tell them they are nothing, that their history and culture are nothing.”

The dichotomy of them and us

Although the canvas of Taseer’s travelogue-memoir spans multiple continents, the discursive elements around which the narration is synthesised reflect deeper echoes with the events taking place in his home country, India. His travels to Mexico illustrate the story of the provincialisation of rice brought by the Spanish after their debilitating conquests, and bring to centre stage the questions over the “anxiety about authenticity – what was one’s own, what had come from outside.”

The other chapters explore the indigenisation of Christianity in Bolivia, the resurgent Buddhism of Mongolia after the conclusion of the spirit-sapping tenure of Communism, and the Shi’ite commemorations of Ashura in Iraq, where “negating the body became necessary for spirit to speak.” These practices had been variously quarantined under Saddam Hussein’s torturous rule.

All these stories, while corralled from countries unrelated to India, seem to be speaking directly to the Indian audience, in a way, egging them on to crane their necks and see past the binary worldview of “them and us” in which they seem to have been trapped.

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, Aatish Taseer, HarperCollins India.