Writer Aatish Taseer speaks on his latest book, and a life after 'exile'
It's a very instinctive process. I have certain concerns that have been formed over many years of reading and thinking. Out in the world, confronted on many occasions by societies I'm travelling in for the first time, I like to use novelty and unfamiliarity as a way to bring the reader in. I'm not interested in assumed knowledge, or in playing the expert. I try instead to replicate in the writing the experience of discovery during travel, whether on the level of people, reading, or observation. That transparency is very important to me.
In one of the chapters, you quote German journalist Sebastian Haffiner's Defying Hitler: 'If one loses [one's own country], one almost loses the right to love any other country.' How does this sentence outline your relationship with India?
It speaks to an aspect of belonging that is a priori. It is something one should be allowed to take for granted. What the government did to me was they turned me into a supplicant, an outsider, someone who had to prove the right to belong. But no one should have to deal with their own country in that way. The beauty of belonging is that it is implicit. It is what allows you to journey away from your place, as well as to look critically at it. I remember Arif Mohammad Khan, during the filming of In Search of India, telling me, 'If someone tells you your father is not your father, you tell him to go to hell.' But that is exactly what was done to me...I just had to go away, with that Coriolanus-like rage that 'there is a world elsewhere.'
Do you feel closer to the self you were searching for when you began writing this?
I don't know if the process is so much one of 'feeling closer' as it is of seeing better. The one implies a kind of finality, whereas curiosity, or inquiry, are never-ending. I do feel, however, that my ability now to balance many societies in my head at once has sharpened and clarified my way of looking.
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