‘A Return to Self’ by Aatish Taseer: Intimate shame of losing one’s country

Aatish Taseer had been harbouring a few dirty secrets. The bonafide “Indian” life had no place for some things — in his own words, he was “the illegitimate son of a Pakistani, a gay man, and a westernised product of a westernised elite”. As happens with secrets too often, one constructs the most elaborate lies to cover them up. The harder he tried to assert his Indian-ness, the stranger his relation with the country became. He learnt Hindi-Urdu, translated a canonical writer, took Sanskrit classes, travelled to rural India, hid his sexuality, and tried forgetting his foreign loves. And yet, it wasn’t enough. It took a few lines of journalistic truth to send him into exile forever. The Government of India revoked his citizenship in November 2019, after he published an article in Time about ‘India’s Divider in Chief’.

“To lose one’s country,” he says, “is to know an intimate shame”, articulating for the first time his ill-fitting world fully, now released from the chokehold of the nation. When Taseer’s estranged father was assassinated, the famous writer VS Naipaul told him that he must feel relieved, because “your [his] father was your [his] greatest enemy”. As father, so nation; what is supposed to be home might just be an odd tale of origin. It is with this relief and tragic honesty that he writes his latest.

Aatish Taseer’s memoir, ‘A Return to Self’, is proof that knowing one’s shame closely might offer a different possibility of freedom. However, it is more than a memoir of his life alone. The ‘self’ in his book refuses the confines of a personal diary, which runs the risk of turning into a long, vengeful confession. On the contrary, the self moves and is often forgotten. Between India (the lost self) and America (the new home) lies a vast expanse of the world, where Taseer wanders — Istanbul, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Spain, Iraq, and others.

He speaks of the language, history, and religion of these “places in between” and quotes Wilde and Eliot, Said and Coetzee to complicate what would otherwise be mere landscape. In form, these chapters are much closer to the essay, which eases the letting go of plot. The self “returns” in bursts, as he trudges through these middle worlds and finds strange similarities with the nation he has lost — histories of invasion, the Silk Road, lotuses in bloom, “churches upon mosques upon churches”, a city repurposed after religious violence, how the word fulano travelled across languages, or the smell of Oudh. These returns are honest, sometimes even brazen, and hence moving.

As he drives past orchards of ripening pomegranate in Uzbekistan, he thinks of Babur, the first Mughal, who “had been homesick in India for the sweetness of the fruits of his native land”. This is not only his own poetic longing for home, but also another image of India, a nation built by those who came from elsewhere. When in Sri Lanka, he discovers that the lotus is the insignia of an ethno-nationalist political party there, similar to India. Taseer points out how its use in seals predates both Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism.

While one might be tempted to ascribe this to a pure past where all religions lived together, before the Britishers, before Partition, he reminds the reader that it is precisely this fantasy of returning to the glorious past that is false, and often fascist. The lotus is born in a bed of nourishing mud, an impure thing. Aatish likens the flower to “our longing to rise above the muck of our lives”, hinting at the desire of the nation.

In the chapter on Spain, when he confronts the complete ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews from Castilian culture, he asks in dismay: “What makes a society succumb to that primal cry for limpieza de sangre, a purity of blood?” An image of India emerges right after, and his own, an unlikely child of two nations that love and hate each other so much. Like a mournful ghost, India lingers in the background of his writing, as Taseer said in a recent interview. This is a ghost full of discontent, and a memory that spans beyond Taseer’s life, into centuries past and even into myth, where a lotus calyx sprouts from Vishnu’s navel. It has unclear origins and asks lamenting questions. The self traced by this ghost is everything India does not want to be today: plural, impure, incomplete.

‘A Return to Self’ shows that the true story of belonging can only be written in conversation with ghosts, not nation-states. It is tempting to claim that this ghost is the idea of India, formulated when the nation came into existence and under assault now, but it might just be our shame, buried in the foundation. Whatever we are writing about, even the self, we are always writing from the outside.

— The reviewer, a translator and poet, teaches at Ashoka University