THE TWICE-BORN

Life and Death on the Ganges

By Aatish Taseer

The “twice-born” in Aatish Taseer’s title are the Brahmins who are “reborn” when they undergo initiation as young men into India’s highest caste. But the word could refer equally well to Taseer himself. His story is a variant of the much-told tale of the American man (or Englishman or European man, seldom a woman) who revolts against the shallowness of Western materialism and goes to India to find his soul, to reinvent himself, to be spiritually reborn. Cross this genre — epitomized by W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel, “The Razor’s Edge” — with the equally shopworn story of the American in search of his ethnic identity and you get a man of Pakistani and Indian heritage who (re)turns to India to find his roots (and/or soul). But Taseer’s is a far more convoluted authorial voice: Born in 1980 in London to a Muslim father (the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, assassinated by an Islamist fanatic in 2011) and a Sikh mother (a famous Indian journalist), Taseer was educated at a posh international school in India and then in America, where he graduated from Amherst College. A successful, often controversial, journalist, he was much praised for his first book, a blend of memoir and travelogue called “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands,” and for his three novels, which deal with a young Indian who returns to his country after some years abroad. It’s not very hard to see an obsessive pattern here, in which “The Twice-Born” forms the final element, since it aims to do for Hinduism (and India) what Taseer’s first book did for Islam (and Pakistan).

It was a difficult re-entry. Taseer describes his own cultural schizophrenia in India: “I saw everything as an Anglicized Indian watching an imaginary European or American visitor watch India, and I had my heart in my mouth as I tried to guess what he would make of it. It was an embarrassment twice removed.” Part of the problem was that he had chosen to view his rediscovered country through the lens of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, which he had studied for a decade.

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Taseer is rightly enthralled by the great richness of Sanskrit literature and by its amazing survival over thousands of years in the minds and lives of Indian scholars, primarily in one community: the Brahmins. He loves the Brahmins for both their knowledge and their disdain for materialism. And his admiration for these unworldly intellectuals, who seem at first to be his kind of people, inspires his appreciation of traditional India, which for him is Hindu India. But this gives him an idealized, airbrushed image of Hinduism and India, which he views en saffron, the color of the robes of ascetics and hence originally a symbol of ascetic Hinduism — but nowadays an emblem of right-wing, nationalist Hinduism. He therefore decides to live in the holiest city of Hindu India, Varanasi.