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

The description of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia reminds one of parallels closer home.

na public conversation in Kolkata in 2010, writer and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was asked if she would describe herself as a “cosmopolitan”.

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.

In 2019, the government revoked Taseer's Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status and forced him into a seemingly permanent exile from the country he grew up in. A British citizen by birth, he had been educated in India and the United States, where he eventually settled down with his husband, Ryan Davis, a lawyer. It was his Pakistani parentage—Taseer’s father was Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab, who was assassinated in 2011 for defending a victim of blasphemy—that became the lynchpin behind cancelling his OCI.