JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
You could argue that the oldest human activity is moving from one place to another. Ancient religious texts and the earliest written stories are full of migrations and voyages. The writer Aatish Taseer experienced this with a jolt in his own life when India's government abruptly revoked his status as an overseas citizen of India. India says there were discrepancies on his application. Taseer's new book is called "A Return To Self: Excursions In Exile," and he spoke with my co-host Ari Shapiro.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
AATISH TASEER: Thank you. It's good to be here.
SHAPIRO: You grew up in India. As an adult, you settled in the United States. And then in 2019, the government of Narendra Modi declared that you were no longer a citizen of India. Why?
TASEER: Well, I'd written that summer the cover of Time magazine and had this very provocative headline, you know, "India's Divider In Chief," and there was the kind of famous Time masthead. And it produced a sort of nuclear reaction amongst Modi's followers in the troll army, and there was a whole kind of wave of digital vandalism. The magazine was receiving hundreds of letters an hour.
And then by August, I received a letter telling me that they were threatening this action. And I kind of lived with it for a couple of months, trying to sort of write back to them and contest it. And then a news portal in India got hold of the story and broke it online, and literally the home minister's sort of secretary jumps on Twitter and cancels my overseas Indian citizenship on Twitter even before I'd received a formal letter. So you can understand the kind of malice behind it and that sort of very Trumpian idea of retribution and of weaponizing citizenship documents as a way to silence critics.
SHAPIRO: You refer to it as a Trumpian idea, and throughout this collection of essays, there are so many moments in so many parts of the world that seem to reflect our present reality in the United States. And I want to get to that in a moment, but first, how much did it matter to you, losing your Indian citizenship?
TASEER: Oh, it mattered tremendously. My grandmother, who raised me, lived in India, and I was not able to see her in her last years. My mother, who's in her mid-70s, is there now. My stepfather had a stroke. I haven't been able to visit them. So it's been hell.
SHAPIRO: Oh, I'm so sorry. This book is part memoir, part travelogue. And we travel with you all over the world to places where currents converge in different ways. Like, you straddle Asia and Europe in the city of Istanbul. You explore the Silk Road trade route through Uzbekistan. One chapter that really struck me is set in southern Spain, which, as you write, for nearly a thousand years was a place known for diversity and coexistence. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side until one day, non-Christians were expelled.
TASEER: Right.
SHAPIRO: And the question you explore in this chapter is, what changed after almost a thousand years? But I'm curious what researching that question revealed to you about our present-day reality in the United States.
TASEER: I mean, in a word, just the fragility of these convivencias. These moments - we've lived through such a glorious moment in these last 50 or 70 years, where it seemed the society was richer in its hybrids, more diverse. You know, I remember people calling me from - after Obama and saying, you know, we're post racial. And there was just this kind of euphoria. And you suddenly realize how powerful a countervailing force was building all the time. And in a trice, that thing that you've kind of cherished that you thought was almost irremovable can be undone. And that's what happened in Spain.
SHAPIRO: I said that migration is one of the oldest human activities, but at the same time, the idea of home and belonging is essential to a sense of identity. Could you read from page 65, where you write a bit about this? This is as you're on the Silk Road through Uzbekistan.
TASEER: OK. (Reading) To never settle was to never be softened by the idea of home. It was easy to see how the decision to stay and build community with all its implications for civilization versus the decision to forge on and live the life of the frontier was among the earliest and most important choices that men had to make.
SHAPIRO: And so how do you balance those two countervailing forces - the pull of home and the pull of journey or exile or migration, whatever word you want to use - in your own life?
TASEER: I mean, I think that you used the word perfectly. I think - did you say balance? Because that's exactly what it is. I think for a long time, I suffered over feeling that - because to balance those things, to balance those twin impulses, produces a kind of discomfort. And one wants to resolve the question once and for all. One wants to feel home. And it's when you recognize the illusion of that, that you realize that you're always going to be balancing those things that you actually achieve a kind of peace. And I think for me, that was very, very important because this book - this is a book both of the search for home within oneself and of restlessness. And I think that if there's any kind of moment of epiphany, it's no longer wanting to tidy away the discomfort of those competing forces.
SHAPIRO: Aatish Taseer's new book is "A Return To Self: Excursions In Exile." Thank you for talking with us about it.
TASEER: Thank you, Ari. It was wonderful talking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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