The art of travelling to places that no longer exist

Aatish Taseer’s new book of travel essays raises questions of identity and belonging that haunt the world we live in

- Somak Ghoshal

na 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.