Скачать или смотреть Between India and Bharat: Aatish Taseer on exile, identity, and the illusion of purity

Watch the full interview: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/2...

In his new book, Return to Self, British-American author Aatish Taseer offers an account that blends personal with political, tracing his exile from India after the revocation of his Overseas Citizen of India card.

Speaking with Abhinandan Sekhri, Taseer recalls how he was in Sri Lanka when his grandmother passed away. Four days into the trip, his mother came to meet him there, leaving him unable to attend the last rites. The moment of dispossession, he suggests, became emblematic of the strange absurdity of exile, growing up in a home where memory was rooted, only to be denied closure at the moment of loss.

The book has a line that reads, “India is a land, Bharat is people, the Hindus. India is historical, Bharat is mythical. India is an overarching and inclusive idea. Bharat is exclusionary.”

Asked to elaborate, Taseer explains: “Every modern nation is an imperfect articulation of a culture, of a civilisation. In the founding of India, there was great sensitivity to the different peoples and communities that became part of an Indian ethos, a kind of Indian multiplicity.”

The very name “India”, he notes, is almost a metaphor for this plurality. Its etymology traces a journey, from Iran into Greek, into Latin, marking it as a word shaped by the gaze of outsiders. “That is part of its beauty,” Taseer says, “but also part of the tension. It’s easy to weaponise that word because it speaks to Indian plurality, but also to the experience of being seen by outsiders. In a country like India, with a history of invasion, the word is charged.”

By contrast, he argues, “Bharat”, especially in its current political use, signals a dangerous fantasy of purity. It is imagined as a return to a time before the foreign gaze, before the cultural accretions of history. “It’s a notion of historical purity,” Taseer says, “a fantasy of wanting to scrape away the different layers of historical accretion in India to get to an imagined idea of what we were before we were changed by the outsider. And that is a dangerous fantasy. The idea of purity is a total illusion.”

This tension between India and Bharat, between inclusion and exclusion, echoes the very theme of his title. Return to Self draws on Ali Shariati’s engagement with Frantz Fanon, an idea that, after the long night of colonisation, societies could return to a “pure culture”, to themselves before Europe intruded. But as Taseer points out, “In every case, that return is a violent exercise.”

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