World Literature: Aatish Taseer’s “A Return to Self”

A life laid bare, a wandering search for meaning, an immersive portal into history and its accompanying reverberations. All this and more can be found in Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile. Part travelogue, part memoir, the work spans from Turkey to Mexico, exploring Aatish Taseer’s uniquely blended identity and asking: Why do certain cities become epicenters of great historical shifts and sites of unpredictable communities?

“I first encountered the work of Aatish Taseer with his 2015 novel, The Way Things Were, which I covered for Vanity Fair. It was erudite, searching, enthralling. His nonfiction is equally compelling—his latest book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, is full of fascinating journeys that, taken together, offer a self-portrait of his search for belonging. ‘With the idea of home gone,’ he writes after being banned from Modi’s India, ‘I stepped out into the world again.’” —Anderson Tepper, Curator for World Literature

After Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship was revoked, he was exiled from the country he had grown up and lived in for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that had formed his identity, urging him to ask broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture—and a nationality—in the process. Everywhere he goes, from Istanbul to Uzbekistan to India, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary. There, too, are the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles between regions. 

In thoughtful prose that combines reportage with romanticism, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes an unstable, politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and gets to the human heart of the shifts and migrations that define our multicultural world.

You can purchase a copy of Aatish’s book, A Return to Self, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon; and the memoir and travelogue The Twice-Born. He is also the translator of a volume of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories from Urdu, Manto: Selected Stories. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a Writer at Large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Born in England and raised in New Delhi, educated in the US, and previously a journalist in the UK, he now lives in New York.

About the Moderator:

Anderson Tepper is City of Asylum’s Curator of World Literature. He has been a guest curator of PEN America’s World Voices Festival and is a longstanding member of the international committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival. He writes on books and authors for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and World Literature Today. Anderson also serves on the City of Asylum Advisory Board.

About Your Visit: 

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