From my Substack:
Aatish Taseer begins his new essay collection A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult 2025) by recounting the Indian governmentâs 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 Pakistanâs 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 âIndiaâs Divider in Chiefâ. He writes: âIn one stroke, Modiâs 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.â
Later in the âIntroductionâ, 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.
Continue reading Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer
