Unbelonging and the idea of home

Meticulous and elegantly written, Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile searches for traces of past civilisations and empires, to make sense of the present

- Saudamini Jain

In 2019, the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. After the initial shock and shame, Taser felt, unexpectedly, relieved. “The burden of trying to fit into India, of... apologizing for my own Westernization, was... lifted from me.

The West, in turn, was no longer some dirty secret that I could enjoy only at the detriment of the ‘real’ India. It was all I had. I was home,” he writes in the introduction to his new book, a small collection of travel essays titled A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile.

After returning from university in America, he had spent time in India “trying to make up for the cultural and linguistic gaps of a colonial childhood”. He “learnt Hindi and Urdu well enough to translate” Manto’s short stories, “devoted hours every day to learning Sanskrit,” wrote two memoirs and three novels including the excellent The Way Things Were (2014). The insider-outsider perspective is a hallmark of his writing. All his work is focussed on untangling ideas of belonging, unbelonging, identity and class, societies at the cusp of transformation, and the inheritance of history.

India has been the source of most of his writing material. It is also where he grew up in a “westernized enclave” in Delhi in the 1980s, raised by his mother, the journalist Tavleen Singh. itis never quite clear why the West was such a dirty secret that Taseer, “a westernized product of a westernized elite could only enjoy it “at the detriment of the ‘real’ India.” But India is not really the point of this book, on his excursions between 2019 and 2024, although it comes up often.