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Face to face

A world beyond labels

Photo: Theo Wenner

Between the personal and universal: Aatish Taseer

A personal journey to discover an absentee father has brought Aatish Taseer, who divides his time between Delhi and London, into the public eye. Thanks to his debut book Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands. Born to an Indian mother and a Pakistani father, Taseer is a new generation writer who seeks to link the specific with the universal, the immediate with the infinite. Not yet 30, he speaks five languages and answers questions with a frankness so characteristic of somebody at peace with his world. Excerpts from a conversation...

This is the first I’ve heard of it, but if there is a storm, it’s very calm at the eye. Those words sound like puzzling descriptions of my book; I would steer clear of them. The book in the end does not speak to such shrill reactions.

I wouldn’t say I was a stranger everywhere. It was a feeling both of familiarity and unfamiliarity. And it was not always a difficult or painful perspective. The ‘stranger’ in the title refers to my estrangement on a personal level from my father and from the land that is Pakistan, in which I have deep origins. It refers also to Pakistan’s historical estrangement from the shared civilisation of the sub-continent.

I have never claimed Pakistan is a monolith; in fact, I’ve gone to great trouble to display its variety. Yemen, as you know, is not part of the book’s narrative. But generalisations do exist in all writing and so do prejudices; the writer must do his best to lay bare his perspective before his reader. There is nothing more dangerous than a writer who claims total objectivity.

I think we’re close to a time in the world when people can afford to ‘slip by those nets’. My view of the world, like that of more and more people around me, is a hybrid view; It cannot be distilled into simple religious and national allegiances. The history of the subcontinent itself has been marked by hybridity, and since for better or worse, I have inherited some of that in my life, I like to embrace that varied history whole. In my own life, that commitment has not been to religion of any kind, but rather to the intellectual fruit of that history: the literatures of Sanskrit, Urdu and English. My pantheon is made up of men like Kalidasa, Shakespeare and Mir.

And people are many things besides: a son, a writer, a friend. I would like to be considered in those ways and not asked to stand behind banners and flags. My Sikh grandfather, when he was asked whether I was being brought up as a Muslim or a Sikh, used to reply, “a human being. He is being brought up to be a human being.” It is to that aspiration that I would like to remain true.

My father, by his own admission, is not a religious man; it would be strange then for me to view the religion at large through his example. But what I was able to see was how someone like him, who on the surface seemed to have no religion, could hold certain political attitudes (in relation to the Holocaust for instance), which though not part of the Book, had the quality of faith. Believing the things he did about the Holocaust — say, that it was trumped up, a Western conspiracy — for an educated man would amount to an assault on reason equal to the concessions people make for faith.

Nothing besides a troubled experience with the modern State, democracy and plurality; a historical pain related to the triumph of the West and a sense of grievance that goes with it, a feeling that the great Islamic past was destroyed and the West is to blame; and lastly, a tension related to the coming of Islam and the history before, even when that history, like in the case of Iran and India, was a glorious history.

In search of the self

A hurried journey through Islamic countries, with little patience for details or complexities.

Stranger To History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, Aatish Taseer, Picador India, Rs.495.

The personal does not always open a window to the universal. That is a lesson that comes through Aatish Taseer’s occasionally engaging, often rambling, search for his absentee father. Born to a Pakistani Muslim man who, as Taseer puts it, ̶ 0;drank Scotch every evening, never fasted and prayed, even ate pork”, and an Indian Sikh lady, Stranger to History is Taseer’s journey of self-exploration. It is a tour that encompasses the entire Muslim world, from the Caliph’s land, to the holiest Muslim cities in Saudi Arabia to Iran, before culminating in Pakistan. Unfortunately, Taseer is too much in a hurry, has little patience for detail, even less so for dissenting strains. At the end, he comes back with a simple if innocent and awry view: the Islamic world is a monolith! The fact could not be farther from opinion.

Let’s take his journey with important stop-over points. Turkey, for Taseer, is a land that “had broken with Islam”. Taseer hails a taxi from Taksim Square for Fatih Carsamba but fails to find a different version of Islam right there. In a radical departure from the Islamic practices across the world, Taksim is a place where communal prayers are not followed every day in mosques. Turkey is also a land where Sufism flourished, and there are robust followers of Rumi even today. But fed with notions of Turkey of a different kind, he concentrates only on “youth…of remarkable beauty... in close-fitting jeans, small T-shirts and dark jackets”. That you can find fully covered women counting the rosary beads on Taksim Square and girls sipping wine on the Bosphorus, the West and the Islamic world co-existing, fails to strike him.

In Saudi Arabia he does things slightly better. Here, however, he concentrates too much on detail to take in the larger picture. Often slipping into “cultural Islam”, Taseer only briefly tries to analyse the difference in religion in Saudi Arabia from its local practices elsewhere in the world or Islam as an organic geographical entity in Arabia.

Similarly, in Syria he fails to gauge the undercurrents of modern thought. He lays too much stock on the Danish cartoon controversy to discover a land teeming with history, also a land where Iraqis, the Palestine, the Syrians all coexist in different permutations of the faith. That Syria is a land where churches are kept in mind at the town planning stage, and a land where hijab is not so much a tool of oppression as a symbol of identity is lost on the author.

However, when he does talk of his father, Taseer lifts the work a notch or two. It is when he talks of his attempts to get across to his father, and his final meeting in Pakistan that one tends to feel his pain, his emotion. Talking of his father, Taseer writes in the third segment of the book, “I had begun my journey asking why my father was Muslim, and this was why: none of Islam’s once powerful moral imperatives existed within him, but he was Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America and Israel, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him….

“As the crow flies, the distance between my father 0and me had never been much, but the land had been marked by history for a unique division, of which I had inherited both broken pieces. My journey to seek out my father, and through him, his country, was a way for me to make my peace with that history. And it had not been without its rewards….”

It is in these parts that one appreciates Taseer’s predicament: a son out to find a father he had never had a chance to know, a child born to parents divided by geography and religion. His attempt to discover Islam through the journey is flawed in conception, and quite hollow in execution. The book shows a youngster’s spark. It also exposes a youngster’s many frailties.

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