A Return to Self
About This Book
In 2019, the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Aatish Taseer's citizenship. He had grown up in India and lived there for thirty years, and the decision cut him off from it in both practical and emotional terms. A Return to Self is the account of what he did next: he went back to the places that shaped him, and used the trip to ask what actually makes a culture or a nationality. The route runs from Turkey to Mexico, and the book moves between travel writing and memoir. In Istanbul, Taseer meets the hopes and ambitions of the younger man he used to be. In Uzbekistan, he finds that a city once at the grand center of the Silk Road now offers visitors mostly a staged, tourist-ready front. In India, he asks why Buddhism, which began there, has so few practitioners today. Across every stop, the ancient and the modern sit side by side. The pandemic leaves its mark, new food cultures emerge, and old cultural conflicts continue in regions around the world. Behind it all is a question about history: when cultures have spent centuries mixing and colliding, often violently, what kind of people come out of that? Taseer writes with a mix of reporting and romantic feeling. He considers what it means to belong to a place that has become a shaky, politicized container for ideas built on exclusion and prejudice. Along the way he looks for the human story in the migrations and shifts that make up our multicultural world, and asks why some cities become the setting for major turning points in history and for communities no one could have predicted.
ISBN: 9781646223312
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