Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the writer Aatish Taseer about his new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Harper Collins India Fourth Estate, July 2025).
In 2019, the Indian government under Narendra Modi revoked the writer Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship, exiling him from the country where he had grown up and lived for thirty years. This loss prompted a journey revisiting the places that shaped his identity, exploring broader questions of the ties that bind us to home.
Spanning Istanbul to Uzbekistan, the high Andes to Mongolia, Taseer’s new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile traces a life shaped by displacement and curiosities. He examines how overlapping pasts of culture, migration, and faith shapes both people and places, and what it means to exist in societies scarred by prejudice, exclusion and a contempt of history.
This episode is now available on Youtube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Episode notes:
A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer (HarperCollins Fourth Estate India, July 2025)
What a New American Citizen Learned on Route 66 - Aatish Taseer (May 2025, The New York Times style magazine)
Food, Offering, Medicine, Political Symbol: What the Lotus Means in Sri Lanka - Aatish Taseer (Nov 2024, The New York Times style magazine)
An Epic Pilgrimage Across Three Great Religions - Aatish Taseer (Nov 2023, The New York Times style magazine)
In Search of a Lost Spain - Aatish Taseer (Nov 2022, The New York Times style magazine)
Returning to Istanbul, a Place of Competing Identities - Aatish Taseer (May 2022, The New York Times style magazine)
Tracing Mexico’s Complicated Relationship With Rice - Aatish Taseer (Nov 2021, The New York Times style magazine)
In Uzbekistan, Coming to Terms With the Country’s Dazzling History - Aatish Taseer (May 2020, The New York Times style magazine)
Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government? Aatish Taseer (May 2019, TIME Magazine)
The pursuit of the Southasian past - Romila Thapar (Jul 2008, Himal Southasian)
Redefining the secular mode for India - Romila Thapar (Jan 2013, Himal Southasian)
The Ram Mandir is the tombstone for India as Southasia’s great secular exception - Vaibhav Vats (Feb 2024, Himal Southasian)
The political erasure of Indian Muslims - Harsh Mander (Jun 2025, Himal Southasian)
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