From discussing how the revoking of his Indian citizenship will impact his writing, to his journey of self-discovery and self-belief through his travels across the world, Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self will intoxicate and indulge the reader in equal measure. Excerpts from an interview
The Imam al Husayn shrine in Karbala, Iraq, in the days leading up to Ashura. Pics Courtesy/Aatish Taseer
Post the revoking of your Indian citizenship, what for you, will always remain as your idea of India? Will you continue to write stories about the country?
It’s a little like that line from Camus: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” There is an inviolate India, the understructure of my creativity that is beyond the reach of this government, but I must also contend with the fact that the physical country has now closed behind me, taking with it everyone I know and love. I don’t know what the effect of this closure will have on my imagination, whether it will be suggestive, or sterile. Many writers have worked out of loss — Bellow from his childhood Chicago; Chaim Grade from Jewish Vilnius, or Vincent O Carter from Black Kansas City. Perhaps, the same will be true of me, perhaps this loss will feed my creativity, allowing me to write and document a world that has ceased to exist — and, as an extension, salvage and recreate what is gone.
How did you shortlist these locations for A Return To Self (HarperCollins India)?
I have this amazing collaboration with the novelist Hanya Yanagihara, who is also the editor-in-chief at T Magazine. She has a great feeling for my concerns, related to syncretism, historical controversy and the unquiet fault lines of the past. She puts a lot of thought into what assignments would work for me, such as writing about the lotus in Hindu-Buddhist thought, or Islamic Spain. Each of these places are like the facets of a mirror, allowing me to explore my deepest preoccupations. In Spain, particularly, I was able to reckon with the existence of a plural society that had been violently cleansed of its plurality. For an Indian — [Spain fell to the Arabs within a year of Sindh] — you can imagine how this is an extremely emotive subject, a way to deal with the present through the ghosts of the past. Each of these pieces are like that — an exercise in finding the ideal fit between the writer, the place and the world beyond. I have used the alienation of background as a way to better see myself.
Gallengolla Rajamaha Vihara, Sri Lanka
What was the most magical part of writing the Istanbul chapter in the book?
The action of memory. It is so surprising in what it chooses to stress or suppress. In this case, an older me was looking at a younger self, full of ambition and vigour, but also closeted, unsure and afraid of life. I was in the city, where the memories and experiences of this younger self were inscribed into the streets and buildings. I was nervous to even step out, and trample the garden of memory. I wanted almost to leave without disturbing the past, which lay as if under a bed of pristine snow. But, naturally, I couldn’t do that. I had to go out into the city and confront my younger self. It was an extremely powerful construction. It could have felt contrived, but it didn’t. There was something exhilarating about writing out of that encounter, of finding a way to capture on the page all that you hoped you might have been, and all that you in fact are.
You used the term ‘unsentimental’ to describe the spirit of the Silk Road; was that a hint of disappointment with that discovery?
...Only in the sense that the world is always new. The Silk Road was primarily a trade route, along which ideas flowed, but the goods and commodities came first. When that flow was disrupted, as it was by the discovery of certain sea routes, the places that were so romantic became defunct. Today, Singapore and Dubai are Samarkand and Bukhara. There is a melancholy to that, but not disappointment. It is a reminder of the hard imperatives — economic, technological and military — that drive the traffic of ideas — khayaalon ka karobar.
The Bolivian chapter reflects upon religion and discoverability. Did you return after your book found a publisher?
I don’t like to revisit a place, unless I am asked to. I’m not even sure I like to travel, without the motivation to write. Outside of work, I feel incredibly sedentary. I want to lie on my sofa: upstate and read. I’m also aware of how powerful first experiences are, and how an untimely return can distort them. Except for India and Istanbul, this is a book filled with, as you say, a spirit of discovery. It creates an energy every bit its own. To revisit is to rethink. It can be powerful, too, but in the way of reflection.
With dancers at Copacabana on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, at the feast of the Virgin of Copacabana
What life lessons did Sri Lanka offer? The lotus appears to be your accompanying instrument throughout that journey...
Exactly! It serves as a kind of decoy, a MacGuffin, if you will. I follow it out of the vegetal state into stone, then art, philosophy and religion, and (finally) into the garish colours of populist politics. Remember it’s the symbol, not just of the BJP, but also the Rajapaksas. The lotus thread, with all its filamental power, gives the piece its inner cohesion. That gossamer strand of narrative is why, in Sanskrit poetry, we need the sutradhara, literally the thread-bearer. Yet these consolations of travel and antiquity are a distraction, because, in Sri Lanka, I’m in the middle of a great personal convulsion. My grandmother has just died. I’ve had no rites of closure. My mother comes down to see me, and the B-tape of this journey of inquiry, becomes a private ritual of mourning. Death, the lotus pool, “With leaves and flowers in bud, widely opened and again dying down — Coomaraswamy tells us — “Is an image of the ebb and flow of human life (samsara).” It has a suggestive power.
At a lotus farm on the edge of a lake, near Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka
Towards the end of the chapter on Iraq, you write about the ‘brave pilgrim’. What pilgrim are you?
Pilgrimage, as Victor and Edith Turner have it, is about the road in to a locus of sanctity, and the road out. The road in is for believers, a lateral journey across space that promotes an inner journey of religious discovery. The road out is a bawdy affair, of tourist busses, inns, stories told over drunken dinners, a Chaucerian communion among human beings. I’m very much a road-out kinda guy. I lurk on the perimeter of faith, too fallen to enter it myself; taking notes, keeping the record; bringing a kind of humanism to the great enterprise of religion. My courage is only that of truth-telling and sympathy. The pilgrim stories I collect are an attempt at capturing all the hope, hurt, malice and love that lives in the human heart before it is converted into a journey of faith.
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