Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

From my Substack:

Aatish Taseer begins his new essay collection A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult 2025) by recounting the Indian government’s 2019 cancellation of his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). The pretext for this decision was that Taseer had concealed the Pakistani origin of his father (the late Salman Taseer, a former Governor of Punjab who was assassinated by his own bodyguard after calling for Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to be amended). However, Taseer believes that the real reason that his OCI was canceled was that he had written a critical article about Prime Minister Modi entitled “India’s Divider in Chief”. He writes: “In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I grew up with still lived.”

Later in the “Introduction”, Taseer describes the impact that this decision had on him and how it led to the essays contained in the book under review:

If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better fit back into Indian life. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home. The strand of elation that runs through them is the simple joy of being out in the world, free of the pressures of belonging. Perhaps there could not have been any other response, given that my country, my material, my world in India,had been snatched from me. I grew up in what felt to me like the crucible of all anxieties related to belonging. Those anxieties run through these essays, but they are also a tribute to the individual. After all the wringing of wrists, the stewing over questions of place, of feeling myself forever betwixt and between, I woke up one day to find the bars of my prison had magically disappeared, and, far from being scared, I felt a new vein of intellectual curiosity had opened for me. With the idea of home gone, I stepped out into the world again.

The book contains eight essays– all of which were initially published by T: The New York Times Style Magazine between 2019 and 2024. Of these essays, I personally found the strongest ones to be “The Ghosts of al-Andalus” and “Pilgrimages”. In the former, Taseer visits Spain in search of traces of the Muslim past. He writes:

There are, I want to say, three societies in the world–Spain, the Balkans, and India–that have known this particular kind of history, namely centuries of Muslim rule among large swaths of an unconverted population. Each of these places has experienced periodic cycles of religious violence and ethnic cleansing, whether it was the Balkans in the 1990s or the bitter partition of India in 1947 that left more than a million dead and caused the largest peacetime migration in the history of humanity. What makes Spain unique is that here the aims of ethnic cleansing were fully realized.

In “Pilgrimages”, Taseer travels through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq. I was particularly struck by the portion in which he describes his visit to Najaf during Ashura–commemorating the martyrdom of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussain at Karbala. He writes:

If the metaphor of pilgrimage remains as potent as it does today,it is because it speaks to our undiminished need for awe, risk, adventure, and, most of all, a release from the mundanity of our daily lives in order to commune with something sacred. We channel these impulses into modern travel, filling it with expectation and dwelling on its shortcomings. In fact it is we, with our fixed ideas of what travel should give us, who fail the journeys we undertake. The pilgrim spirit is one that wanders away from the comfort and safety of home secure in the knowledge that the transformation the pilgrim will undergo over the course of his journey is the destination. The shrine is a mere decoy. Pilgrimage is above all an inward journey, free of external ideas of outcome: To be disappointed in one’s aims only reinforces faith. This is what separates a pilgrimage from a business trip, say. The true lesson of pilgrimage in a secular context instructs us to set out into the world with a questing spirit that is unafraid of looking without finding, allowing curiosity, sympathy, and self-improvement to do the work of faith.

Taseer is a wonderful essayist (incidentally a much better essayist than a novelist). Each of the essays contained in the book reveal a distinct writerly voice and are a pleasure to read. Asides from Spain and Iraq, various essays take him to Uzbekistan, Morocco and Sri Lanka. As he describes his experiences, he reflects on ideas of identity and exile. It is this preoccupation with identity that gives the book a coherent shape uniting what were otherwise disparate pieces of travel writing.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend A Return to Self to those interested in travel writing. I look forward to reading what Aatish Taseer produces next.