Events & Calendars Aatish Taseer ’03: "We Shall Be a Country with No History"

Join us for an evening with Aatish Taseer ’03, author and contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times.

Taseer will discuss his experiences at Amherst, with its moments of protest, racial tension and self-reflection, and how they gave him a new perspective on his country of origin, India. His experiences gave him an important lesson: history is a strong vessel for self-improvement, and historical awakening elicits a demand to be seen. Taseer now notices those who need to be heard and has worked to be an active voice for these people.

Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and three acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize; The Temple-Goers, which was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award; and Noon. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The International New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York.

In his forthcoming book, The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges, Taseer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in an intoxicating, unsettling personal reckoning with modern India, where ancient customs collide with the contemporary politics of revivalism and revenge

When Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was 18, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.

Known as the "twice-born"—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India—and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of “Victory to Mother India!” and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence.

From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.

The event is funded by the Croxton Lecture Fund.