Aatish Taseer, with roots in England, India, Pakistan, and the USA, appears to be a member of the globalized elite, able to call multiple nations his own. For Taseer, however, there is only one country he calls home. A self-described “Indian writer”, Taseer, for much of his adult life, has distanced himself from his absentee, Pakistani politician father. Still, despite Taseer’s best efforts, his father’s nationality has come back to haunt him.

In May 2019, Taseer published a cover article for Time magazine criticizing Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi, calling him “India’s Divider in Chief”. Only a couple months later, Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India (in fact, a sort of permanent residency) was suddenly revoked by the Indian government, on the grounds of his father’s Pakistani nationality. Taseer, who “moved back [to India] after college … with the aim of being ‘an Indian writer’,” considers his whole identity tied up with being Indian and belonging to the nation of India. Suddenly, in 2019, he “became ‘Pakistani’ in the eyes of Modi’s government,” and thus was forcefully “exiled” not only from India, his country of residence, but from his identity, his conception of himself. As Taseer says in the introduction to A Return to Self:

India was my country. The relationship was so instinctive that, like an unwritten constitution, I had never before felt it necessary to articulate it. I could say I was Indian because I had grown up there, because I knew its festivals and languages, and because my books were steeped in its concerns and anxieties. I was a British citizen by birth–the OCI was a substitute for dual citizenship–and, even though love had taken me to the United States, I returned to India frequently to write about it and visit the only family I had ever known.

Taseer tries to explain exactly what makes him Indian, but he can’t.

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile is not about an exile in the traditional sense. Taseer, in fact, has multiple homes to return to, in New York and London, and his Indian family can and does travel to see him in nearby Sri Lanka. Instead, the travel essays that make up A Return to Self chart Taseer’s obsession with his identity and with national identity in general, as he tries to figure out what exactly makes something Indian, what exactly causes something to belong to a particular country. Taseer tries to explain exactly what makes him Indian, but he can’t—he seems instead as if he’s trying to convince himself of his nationality after the death blow Modi’s administration dealt to his sense of self.

Thus, as Taseer visits each new country in A Return to Self, he tries to understand the essence of that country; what makes, say, a Sri Lankan Sri Lankan.  While in Mexico, Taseer considers the words of writer and ambassador Octavio Paz:

“The nations of ancient Mexico,” Paz writes, “lived in constant war, one against the other, but it was only with the arrival of the Spaniards that they really faced the other, that is, a civilization different from their own.” That sentence, mutatis mutandis, could have been written about India, where Islamic invasions and British rule still produced an anxiety about authenticity–what was one’s own, what had come from outside. I was interested in that anxiety, which could manifest itself both in tangible and intangible ways.

Why does Taseer shy away from being labeled “Pakistani”; what makes being Indian something desirable in comparison? In an essay on perfumery, Taseer inadvertently clarifies his position on this question:

The rise of the orientals [scents] in the late 1970s, of which Opium [by Yves Saint Laurent] was emblematic, marked one of the many moments when the West was speaking through the East of things that had more to do with the West than with the East. There is something fascinating to me (though rarely benign) in the idea of another, more powerful culture expressing itself through yours–cultivating, as [Edward] Said writes, “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”

Taseer remains notably apolitical through the whole book.

Taseer, in A Return to Self, seems less concerned with India itself, with the political repercussions of Modi’s administration, which has stretched for over 11 years and presumably will continue until at least 2029. And although Taseer does pause frequently to call out Modi’s Hindu nationalism and majoritarian policies, he does so primarily to criticize Modi’s revocation of his Overseas Citizenship of India. On all other fronts, Taseer remains notably apolitical through the whole book, even as he travels through countries experiencing far more instability than India.

Taseer is speaking, through India, “of things that ha[ve] more to do with” himself, of his own desire to have an identity, to put himself inside a category. Interestingly, Taseer’s confusion and desperation over his exile from his own sense of self are never resolved in A Return to Self; Taseer never returns “to self”. His observations through his travel essays, his musings on culture and its development, are said simply and arise naturally. Taseer’s commentary on the world around him, a front for his own inner turmoil, becomes a fascinating glimpse into the consequences of staking one’s identity on nationality.

Ria Dhull is an artist and collector based in NYC. Her writing also appears in Spectrum Culture.