Review: Return to Self; Journey into Exile by Aatish Taseer

After returning from university in the US, he spent his time in India “trying to fill the cultural and linguistic gaps of his colonial childhood” – he “learned Hindi and Urdu well enough to translate Manto’s short stories”, “devoted hours every day to learning Sanskrit”, wrote two memoirs and three novels, including the excellent, very perceptive The Indian Express. the way things were (2014). The insider-outsider perspective is the hallmark of his writing. All of his work focuses on untangling ideas of belonging, non-belonging, identity and class, a society on the cusp of change, and the legacy of history. India has been the source of most of his writing material. It was here that he grew up in a “western area” of Delhi in the 1980s, raised by his mother, journalist Tavleen Singh, from one of the city’s prominent Sikh families. It is never clear why the West was such a dirty little secret that Taseer, “a Western product of the Western elite, could only enjoy it at the expense of the ‘real’ India”. But India isn’t really the point of this book, a collection of eight essays on his travels between 2019 and 2024, although it comes up frequently.

Taseer traveled extensively from the Mediterranean to the Andes T: The New York Times Style MagazineIn each of his travels, he explored cities as cultural symbols, discovering traces and layers of past civilizations and empires to understand the present.

In Istanbul, he reflected on how much his life and Turkey have changed since he first visited as a young writer in 2005, a few years after Erdogan was elected prime minister and hoped for economic growth and democratic reforms. In Uzbekistan, which, over the centuries, became “the land of many natures – Turkic and Persian, on which the Russian language was composed”, Taseer traveled from Tashkent to Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, once deeply cosmopolitan caravan cities along the old Silk Road. In Morocco, he looked for ghosts of the past in the Draa Valley, where he was told of “medieval Islamic libraries in small Saharan towns, shrines to desert saints and old Jewish houses” and traces of indigenous Berbers, which “served as a link with the land’s ancient past.” In Spain, he sought to understand how a place where Jews, Muslims and Christians had coexisted for a thousand years came to this end: “How does a place so steeped in diversity become unstable? Why does a society have to succumb to that primitive call? Limpieza de Sangre‘Purity of blood’?

They followed the colonial history of rice in Mexico and the ubiquitous symbolism of the lotus in Sri Lanka. There is an article on the politics of fragrance.

For the most ambitious essay, he embarked on a journey following old pilgrimage routes across history and continents. Over the course of a year, he set out on three pilgrimages: from the indigenous Catholic festival of the Virgin of Copacabana in the Andes mountains in Bolivia, to the plains of Mongolia, where Buddhism – banned when the country was a Soviet satellite state – was experiencing a quiet renaissance, and finally to Iraq during Ashura, the Shia ritual of mourning. “Pilgrimage,” he found, “gave us the illusion of moving forward in space, even as it allowed an inner journey toward dialogue with our past.”

The essays are a compelling blend of reportage, history, and memoir. Attractive characters appear. In Taroudant, he was invited by Farah Pahlavi, the last Persian empress in exile, who is “still radiant at 80, with black ribbons in her blonde hair and coral around her neck”, who has a house there, “for a wonderful dinner full of friends and family, where the talk would turn to exile and revolution and the elite being driven out of countries that are very were changing rapidly.” At Erdene Zou, Mongolia’s oldest surviving monastery, he met a herder from the Inner Mongolia region of China who had come under political threat on a pilgrimage not only to the Buddha but also to Genghis Khan. She told him, “I wanted to receive the special energy of this man here, who was the capital of the Mongol Empire and Buddhism.” In Spain he met Medina Tenour Whiteman, a 40-year-old British-American woman whose parents had moved to Granada before his birth because “the whole dream of reviving Islam in Europe was there.” Granada was the place where the last Moriscos, Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity in medieval Spain, had fled, and where “the memory of an autonomous European Islam still lingered in the marrow.” Some of these, while interesting, are a bit hazy – I had to look on the Internet to clarify that her parents were white converts to Sufism.

Taseer quotes from the works of writers and scholars. His book is meticulously researched, the descriptions are vivid and the writing is elegant. Except when it gets complicated. For example, he becomes emotional when describing pollination in a lotus:

“Bending down to Ashoka, measuring the calyx of a flower against the length of his forearm, showing me how to pluck its fibrous rough stalk (never pull; this is a rapid back-and-forth motion, like breaking a cock’s neck), I remembered that this gentle matinee scene had been the site of sexual ecstasy the night before. The lotus flower, a great seducer that lives only three days, was Uses scent – which becomes heavier every hour through a process called evaporation – to draw insects to its range. As night falls, the petals close, trapping the hexapods inside. ‘Encouraged by the heat,’ writes British horticulturist Mark Griffiths in The Lotus Quest: In Search of the Sacred Flower (2009), ‘pollen shed by the captive golden wings They feed on garbage and have fun. Oubliette becomes the scene of an orgy. In the morning, the petals open again, releasing pollen-covered insects into the cool air. The shock of sudden exposure makes them unable to tell the difference between morning and evening. So now all around me, sleepy six-legged sexual prisoners of what Griffiths calls ‘false evening’ were seeking rest in newly opened lotus pads, different from the pads where they had spent the night, and thus unsuspecting agents. Were working as. Of diffusion.”

By the early 2000s this kind of travel writing might have been acceptable, even expected, but it irritates the contemporary reader. Taseer himself sometimes appears in an unexpected form. Marrakesh, he writes ruefully, “once attracted the Tuareg, a West African tribe that ran caravan routes through the Sahara since at least the fifth century BC and were known as the ‘blue people’ of the desert because of their indigo-dyed robes,” now, he adds disdainfully, “full of the tourist trash of Europe – the EasyJet set.” It is also a city where, he notes wistfully, glamorous European families owned homes. He jokes that Bukhara, the city of hundreds of madrassas and caravanserais and 100 or more mosques, had fallen victim to the only fate worse than Genghis Khan, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse: tourism. It all happened while staying at the Swissotel in Istanbul, where he “paid $45 extra per night for a view of the Bosporus, taking in the sunlit splendor of the most beautiful body of water in the world.”

It is this grandeur of its own that will continue to haunt Indian readers. The issue of country comes up again and again and at times it feels as if Taseer responds to the cruelty meted out to him by the Indian state with hatred towards India. He writes, “If these essays feel like a return to the self, it is because they represent a return to my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after a long night of cutting off parts of myself to live better in India. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of ​​home.”

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.