A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile
By Aatish Taseer
Catapult
ISBN: 978-1646222797
240pp.

In May 2019, Narendra Modi won his second term as Prime Minister of India. At about the same time, the influential Time Magazine of New York published a cover story by Aatish Taseer titled ‘India’s Divider in Chief’. As a direct result, within months, the vengeful prime minister revoked the British-born Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India, thus expelling him from the country he had grown up in and lived in for 30 years. India was his mother’s country and a place where he wanted to belong.

As a reaction to his expulsion, Taseer began writing A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, which can be called a travelogue and a memoir combined. His book, published in July 2025, is a manifesto for urbanity and cultured, humane worldliness, where the author looks everywhere for connections and not chasms. However, this book is far more than a personal memoir; it is a poetic and philosophical exploration of the condition of modern man, in a world where liberalism has lost its moral authority and spiritual resonance.

The title itself, Return to Self, is a culturally loaded phrase. It implies more than personal introspection; it signals a retreat from the secular, deracinated worldview of liberal modernity towards older, spiritually grounded traditions. This ‘return’ is not framed as a regression into dogma but as a rediscovery of authenticity.

His travels take him to Istanbul, Spain, Bolivia, Iraq, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco and Uzbekistan, among others. At every destination, he seeks to understand the symbols and substance of local civilisations, whether it is their food, perfume, prayers, language or architecture.

Atish Taseer’s latest memoir/travelogue is a poetic and philosophical exploration of the condition of modern man, in a world where liberalism has lost its moral authority and spiritual resonance

In the introduction, titled ‘Demands of Belonging’, Taseer explores the tensions between personal identity, cultural inheritance, and the longing for rootedness in an age of dislocation. He begins by reflecting on his own complex heritage as the son of a Pakistani Muslim father, Salman Taseer, a former governor of Pakistani Punjab who was assassinated, and an Indian Sikh mother, Tavleen Singh, who was a journalist, raised in secular, cosmopolitan India. This duality, and the absence of a clear belonging to either tradition or history, sets the stage for the central questions of the book.

Taseer introduces the idea that liberal, secular societies — while offering individual freedom — can often leave a void where cultural and spiritual rootedness once existed. He observes that many people, especially those from post-colonial or diasporic backgrounds, are increasingly drawn to strong forms of identity — religious, nationalistic or ethnic — as a way to fill this void.

The introduction also sets up the book’s broader journey: a search across different cultures and geographies — from the Islamic world to Latin America and East Asia — to examine how societies navigate the competing pressures of tradition and modernity, authenticity and liberalism. Taseer suggests that the “return to self” is not simply a reactionary retreat, but a complex response to the “demands of belonging” in a fractured world.

He writes: “The liberal vision I had grown up with — of a world of free individuals, shorn of tribe, caste and creed — had begun to seem, in many parts of the world, not only unworkable but alienating. The question was not simply why people turned to identity, but why the promise of freedom, of being unbound, no longer satisfied.”

This passage encapsulates Taseer’s central concern: why modern liberalism, once seen as a path to liberation, now feels insufficient or even hollow to many — leading them to seek more rooted, sometimes illiberal, forms of belonging.

In the chapter on Istanbul, the city becomes a lens through which he examines Turkey’s ongoing struggle between secularism and a reassertion of Islamic identity. Taseer is drawn to Istanbul not just for its beauty or history, but because it embodies the civilisational crossroads — the tension between East and West, modernity and tradition — that lies at the heart of his book.

He reflects on Atatürk’s radical secular reforms in the early 20th century, which sought to Westernise Turkey by suppressing its Ottoman-Islamic past. But as Taseer travels through contemporary Istanbul, he observes a cultural resurgence — a return to religious symbols, headscarves, Ottoman nostalgia, and a popular embrace of Erdogan’s more Islamist vision. This, he argues, reflects a deep yearning for rootedness and historical continuity after decades of enforced secularism.

He writes: “In stripping the country of its Ottoman past, Atatürk had created a vacuum. What rushed in to fill it decades later was not the reasoned universalism he had hoped for, but a potent, mythic nationalism laced with religion.”

In one of the book’s most evocative essays, set in southern Spain, Taseer reflects on the cultural pluralism of Al-Andalus, where Muslims, Jews and Christians once coexisted and produced a flourishing civilisation. He mourns its demise not as a romantic lament but as a historical parable. The dismantling of that pluralistic order, he suggests, serves as a warning for our own times: pluralism is not self-sustaining; it requires active moral and political commitment.

The comparison with the United States today, particularly under the pressures of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, is implicit but powerful. Just as India has turned its back on Nehruvian secularism, the US appears to be unravelling the liberal consensus established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and reinforced by Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) civil rights and immigration reforms. In both cases, majoritarian identity politics challenge the fragile foundations of postwar pluralism.

Yet Taseer resists easy answers. Return to Self is a book of questions, elegies and yearnings. Its essays refuse tidy closure, prioritising emotional and philosophical truth over ideological coherence. This is both its power and its limitation. While it does not provide a clear roadmap for restoring liberalism or re-rooting modern selves, it does articulate, with poetic clarity, the cost of living without such a map.

In the end, Taseer’s “return” is not nostalgic. It is a recognition that, to move forward, we may first need to look back — not to recreate the past, but to recover what was lost in our rush toward a future that no longer satisfies.

His finest essay describes a triptych of pilgrimages: a syncretic Catholic-cum-pre-Columbian fiesta near Lake Titicaca in the Andes; a shamanic-Buddhist ceremony near the birthplace of Genghis Khan; and an Iraqi Shiite display of “grief, memory, love” to mark the martyrdom of Hussain, Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) grandson.

In many ways, Taseer’s book is also my lifelong narrative. My 1998 book Writing Across Boundaries and 2021 travelogue A Wanderer Between the Worlds — which have both been reviewed in Dawn — echo the same thoughts. Like me, he found his identity and mojo in exile. It seems that some wanderers find fulfillment when they are history-less and homeless.

The reviewer is a retired diplomat.

His latest book is titled From Lahore to Washington via Brussels.

He can be contacted through his website, www.javedamir.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 7th, 2025