Aatish Taseer’s earliest memory in India is of saying “Hai, hai!”, and then “Indira Gandhi, hai, hai!” Born to renowned Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, and Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer, the politics of this side of the world inevitably brewed in his blood right from birth. In conversation with Ranvir Shah, cultural activist and founder of The Prakriti Foundation, at the session ‘The Way Things Were’, Aatish spoke of his childhood, his complex relationship with his father, his lineage, and the making of his many books, the latest titled The Way Things Were , from which he also read excerpts.
Aatish was 19 when he wrote his first complete manuscript, a story he’s glad “ended up in the drawer”. By his early 20s, he’d spent a few years struggling with fiction writing, had just quit his job as a reporter at TIME magazine, and reconnected with his estranged father, when the London bombings took place.
Set in the context of radical Islamism, Aatish wrote a story that eventually made it to the cover of Prospect magazine, a copy of which he sent his father. Salmaan Taseer responded in rage. “Here was an unbelieving, irreligious man offended with all the force of faith. I was curious to understand what part of someone’s political and historical identity was governed by Islam, and so began one of my earliest books Stranger to History ,” said Aatish.
Aatish’s most recent book is set between 1975 and 1992, a period he calls “enfolded by night and fog on both sides”, for its framing between the Emergency, the Sikh riots, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The Way Things Were tells the life story of Toby, a Sanskrit scholar enamoured by classical India, who is whisked through the terrors of the present-day nation and emerges disillusioned by reality. For its writing, Aatish became something of a Sanskrit scholar himself, a desire that began from a desperation to “hear a voice from classical India”.
What it gave him eventually was a window into “the magnificent story” of a language that played “liturgical, political and literary” roles for thousands of years.
The Way Things Were is thus as much a tale about India’s transformative years, with veiled references to the political figures of the times, as it is about Sanskrit and its powerful influences. “Sanskrit’s shared histories of sound and meaning with numerous European languages, for me, mitigated that sense of impoverishment of being a writer in English, writing about India,” says Aatish.
As for whether his personal history had worked its way into his writing in any sense, Aatish said that one made peace with living, working and being from different places with different histories. “You live close to the ground.”
