A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile

by Aatish Taseer

Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Nonfiction

A blend of travelog and memoir spanning from Turkey to Mexico, exploring Aatish Taseer’s uniquely blended identity and Why do certain cities become epicenters of great historical shifts and sites of unpredictable communities?

In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi revoked Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity, and asking broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and a nationality, in the process. 

In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist façade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated there, is so little practiced. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them? 

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel, Travelogue, History

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2025

About the author

Aatish Taseer has worked as a reporter for Time Magazine and has written for the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, Prospect, TAR Magazine and Esquire. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009) and a highly acclaimed translation Manto: Selected Stories (2008). His novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa First Novel Award. A second novel, Noon, is now available published by Picador (UK) and Faber & Faber (USA). His work has been translated into over ten languages. He lives between London and Delhi.

Reviews

[Chaitanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in 2019, Aatish Taseer wrote an essay in TIME Magazine regarding the prospect of a second term of the Modi led BJP government. The backlash from it led to the Government of India revoking his Overseas Citizenship of India. Forced into exile from the country where he spent his formative years, he found himself thinking about the ideas of belongingness, identity, and culture. Shaped by his extensive travels around the world, this collection of essays placed the nomadic spirit of a traveler in areas that are holding onto the idea of a long-diluted "purity" of customs that seem anachronistic with the current world.

Aatish is a well-travelled man, and the breadth of the essays highlight that in abundance. As we traverse through Turkey, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Spain, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Mongolia, Iraq and a brief stint in India, we learn how societies have morphed, cultures have been altered, traditions revised, and this idea of the preservation of something untainted has always been challenged by the human desire to wander. Yet, this fascination of retaining how things were, or used to be, endures in the hands of some families that insist upon honoring the older ways. I was drawn to this contradiction the most.

I do not share this cultural fascination of "purity" so it was jarring to me to see the sheer devotion with which some cultures stuck to their past. But even in their disparate manners, they confirmed my belief that people are the same everywhere, and that their lives hit the same notes in the octaves of life.

I will confess that my lack of knowledge of other countries and their histories impeded my joy of the book at times because information regarding customs, rulers, and geographical elements came a mile a minute, and it whooshed over my tiny brain. Had I paused to read up on the many passing references that were peppered throughout, I would have kept reading it until the end of 2025.

Anytime Aatish graced the reader with reflections from his life and childhood, he had my attention. But that is also the type of reader that I am - drawn to people's inner lives and memories on a micro level. Like Aatish, I was also very close to my Nani, and I felt for him and how deeply tragic it was that political circumstances prevented him from being present for her final moments. Yet life goes on.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

It'd be wise of me to make this my last review of the year 2025, but no promises there. As for the piece itself, as is so often these days, I was initially drawn by the queer, but I also hoped for the sort of narrative on far flung places that I had found so much pleasure in through the likes of Calcutta and Names for the Sea: as much a ward against the boorish behavior of a future self who finally sets out, passport in hand, as a slaking of curiosity in the holes of history that, as always, deepen more quickly than I could fill them. For the most part, that is what I got, as Taseer certainly doesn't shy away from a broad spread of musing peregrinations, at least nine countries spanning four continents serving as a tableau running from suppressed religious rites to scatologically controversial perfumes. Unfortunately, the rather obtuse US propaganda shaded everything with that sort of suspect glare that "AI" is currently adulterating the art world with, and it was with some sense of hilarity watching the adjectives shift from "bureaucratic" to "revived" depending on which economic system was ravaging it. In any case, I did particularly enjoy the piece on Spain, which continues to climb ever higher in my eventual travel itinerary. So, I wish Taseer the best in his travels: he certainly knows which side of his bread is buttered, but as he is the one being paid for his writing and I am not, best to not fill this glass house with any more stones.

The ovoo is a monument to the spirits of the natural world, known here as nagas and savdags. Orgil, following the custom of honoring these easily offended beings, lest they punish you for your neglect, honked three times as we went by. "This is the Gen Z way," he said, grinning, "but I prefer the old way," which involves circling the ovoo on foot three times in a clockwise motion.

[Vaishnavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half really. The half is for Mongolia and Iraq. I wish the story telling had not been weighed down by its vocabulary. Could have been a nice 4 stars.

[Vidhya Nair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed his prose which was imaginative & succinct and came from a deeper place. I connected with his emotional attachment and detachment to place, people and experiences and his curiosity about cultures, religion, political landscape. Many of his travel stories are places I’m interested to visit. His stories on Mongolia, Iraq, srilanka were particularly poetic and moving. I enjoy his writing style and appreciate how he brings India into his narrative and how poignantly he’s unable to return. The fact that that hasn’t outraged more people in India and instead negative judgments or indifference has set in is equally disturbing. I look forward to reading more of his work.

[Meema · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are three main ways I pick up a book. The writer/book has been recommended by another writer/trustworthy source (this is my favourite way and perhaps one of the reasons I keep reading, basically to find more books inside other books. Jim Jarmusch gave me William Carlos Williams, The Office gave me David Graeber, the list goes on), a canon item(a.k.a legend category), and lastly books by faves (preferred authors, I'd likely read any and all of their work). I have no idea how I came across Aatish Taseer. He doesn't fit into any one of these criteria. And yet I find myself following him on Instagram for months if not years now. Using my best little grey scales, I have pinpointed perhaps an essay or article I maybe read by him. He has published a lot of those and it's likely I came across one. His writing is , as the kids would put it, hella, engaging. I suspect the discourse of that essay may have had something to do with migration and identity and finding oneself at curious crossroads where the question is just that, a question. This book is also set up with a similar pretext. Taseer is the son of an Indian journalist and Pakistani politician, and remained estranged from his father for most of his life until Taseer senior is a victim of his own bodyguard. (Oh Pakistan.)Taseer has an Indian upper-middle class bourgeois upbringing, his words not mine, complete with an education abroad and cushy resettlement back in India. Except that his sexual preference(?) is not the dominant one in India and he marries his American beau and resettles in New York. The problem is, he goes on to criticize the Indian prime minister of the day for diminishing the Indian pluralistic identity and gets his Indian citizenship revoked. Quite an extraordinary turn of affairs. After all this context and the preface and title of this book, I sat down for some form of resolution.

Sadly that never happened. Taseer visits a few countries and compares his impressions from younger days to now. I cannot tell if he is well-read or if he researched well as these were in some aspect commissioned pieces. There are too many quotations from this person or that, every few sentences, to the point of distraction. I can visit the library myself if I needed to. None of the essays stick with me for anything although I am greatly saddened at the state of affairs he describes in Uzbekistan, a location high up on my list of destinations to tick off. Neither did I know the aftermath of the Russian occupation, nor do I want to see a tourist trash, his words, swarming the markets if I ever did make it there. I simply wanted to see for myself what made Hafiz write these lines
"Should that Turk of Shiraz take my heart into her hands,
I would give up Samarkand and Bukhara for her beauty mole."


Anyway eventually he does a round of 3 pilgrimages in Mongolia, Bolivia and Iraq. And oh do you want to read that piece. That could have just been its own thing. If there was any catharsis, there was that in that piece. It is enthusiastically religious and while Taseer never clarifies his religion, although he makes it fairly clear he would prefer to be a cultural Hindu, even if for nostalgic reasons, the visits to Catholic, Shiite Muslims, and Buddhist holy events bring the circle back to dot and lays down the most solid answers to some of those early questions. It helps both the writer and this reader make some sense of grief, of love and of memory. I have always thought ceremonies and rituals are a way to remind people of other people, not of god, by making their deepest/hidden/better-forgotten emotions visible, tangible. Through writing this review, I am now prepared to forgive the previous pages of this book because it eventually came to this last piece right here.

[Himanshu Damle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Taseer's work on liminality, traversing the sacred (like a prosaic dirge) to gastronomy via perfumery. A travelogue filled with anxiety, a sense of loss, the book is crisp, curt and witty in spaces where one rarely gets to tread, for uncertainty of the unknown, reveals an overwhelming sense of the sublime, after only having audaciously undertaken the daring adventure that draws on spirituality. Be it the revered Lotus, or the unforgiving vastness of the alienating desert, or the rugged emptiness of Mongolia, or the trauma-inducing Shiite rituals in Najafgarh and Karbala, 'A Return to Self' is a discovery of the becoming rather than the being, in the face of adversity rooted in the politics of apathy, indifference, bigotry and divisiveness. One cannot help but feel sympathetic to the symptoms of Taseer's personal ordeal with the travails he is subjected to, specifically post the 2019 scathing 'Time' piece, but there is a branching to a multidimensionality from his Twice-Born and Stranger to History, in that A Return to Self is soul's laceration touching the chord of ubiquitous vulnerability that defines the essence of being human. This is where liminality is exposed and concealed simultaneously. A brilliant narrative of a brilliant writer, the book is everything but pusillanimous in its clarion call to sanctity (A Door to Sahara is my favourite from here). A definitive read.

[Kelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer is a deeply reflective and elegantly written memoir that merges travel narrative with philosophical inquiry. Through journeys from Turkey to Mexico, Taseer masterfully examines the fluid boundaries of belonging, identity, and displacement. His exploration of cultural intersections where ancient civilizations meet modern uncertainties gives the book a timeless quality. In weaving personal exile with broader meditations on nationality and faith, Taseer creates a work that resonates with the political, spiritual, and human dimensions of being “in between worlds.” Both intimate and intellectual, A Return to Self is a powerful contribution to the global conversation on exile, identity, and the meaning of home.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Aatish Taseer lost his Indian Overseas Citizenship after writing a critical article on Indian PM Modi, Taseer and his editor decided he should explore other parts of the world. The essays were originally written in the NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE. I read the last essay on pilgrimages in Bolivia, Mongolia, and Iraq earlier in this magazine. The essays to all these places pushed Taseer to look more deeply into himself. An interesting book.

[Jenny D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the fascination of the kept old-world practices and the new world of the three predominant religions was an interesting look at how pilgrimage is more about mixing two distinct ideas- the old and the new into a found journey. It's more artsy and intellectual than self-reflective but it mixes identity with the history that has oppressed that identity.

[Luella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part travelog, Part memoir. A man's search for his own peace and well being after being exiled from the country he grew up in. Beautiful descriptions of the sights, the foods, the scents and the cultures. Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways and Catapult for the book.

[Raghav Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was no causal link between the exile and the pilgrimages. Perhaps he wants to convey that exile has heightened his sensitivities and openness to experience more. But I liked the articulation and beautiful expression.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a neat combination of reflection post exile (thanks Modi government!) and travelogue based reflections in the immediate aftermath of exiling. Absolutely gorgeous descriptions while he's at it.

[Sushil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of hearing Aatish Taseer discuss this book and even met with him briefly before reading it earlier this year.

There is a lot to appreciate about this book. I like that Aatish focuses into one particular thing or subject in each of the countries or areas he visits. I also appreciate the book because he visited a lot of places I’ve been curious about, but I really don’t know much about.

He gave me a lot to think about too. There was one particular chapter on the scent of oudh, how common it is in India, and what it came to represent for much of the Europe and the U.S. I remember thinking about it as I was reading Beena Kamlani’s The English Problem because there’s a point in the story where Shiv, the Indian Barrister-to-be, is figuring out what cologne he wants to purchase like it is the single most important decision in his life.

I can’t say every chapter was engaging though. I remember 2-3 of them felt more like a chore to get through than the rest. I think one of them was on Salt.

Anyways, I think this book is still worth the read. It’s a great reminder that everything we’re looking at is seen through a lens, even ourselves. Sometimes, where we stay is a prison of perspective from which only movement and travel can liberate us.