Aatish Taseer
Encyclopedia
Aatish Taseer is British-born writer-journalist, and the son of India
n journalist Tavleen Singh
and late Pakistani politician and businessman Salmaan Taseer
.
to Salman Taseer and Tavleen Singh
. They were unmarried, and separated shortly afterwards. Taseer grew up in New Delhi
, before going off to a residential school
in Kodaikanal
. Later he graduated in French and Political Science
at Amherst College
, Massachusetts
.
, and as a freelance journalist also written for Prospect magazine
, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, TAR Magazine and Esquire.
's short stories from the original Urdu, Manto: Selected Stories (2008).
His first book Stranger to History : A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands (2009), part memoir-part travelogue, has been translated into more than 14 languages and hailed as a 'must-read' for anyone attempting to understand the Muslim world. The book caught the attention of Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul, who labelled Taseer 'a young writer to watch'. It is a rare endorsement from Naipaul and confirms Taseer's talent.
His first novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was also very well received; it was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa First Novel Award.
A second novel, Noon (2011), has been published by Faber & Faber (USA), Picador (UK and India). It is, for a writer so young, a very incisive and assured novel. It completes what is a trilogy of a sort, even though the first book is not a novel; they all draw from elements of the writer's own turbulent life and complement each other; revealing and adding layers. The episodic structure and spare but fluid prose communicate the jaggedness of the sometimes-main-protagonist/sometimes-narrator, Rehan Tabassum's life. The completeness of 'story' in each episode is set against the deliberately ruptured narrative structure of the novel as a whole, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps. Noon also expresses perhaps more successfully than most non-fiction on the subject, the complexity and contradiction within the societies of India and Pakistan; it reveals the casual cruelty prevalent in one and the perpetually lurking potential for violence in the other. On display in parts of the book is virtuoso storytelling at par with the great Russian writers - the different levels at which wealth and power and talent are at work in a society built on the framework of caste and class; wheels within wheels are laid bare masterfully.
Like Taseer's other two books, there is something ominous about 'Noon'. But a reader's foreboding turns to a kind of baffled amazement once he or she knows the truly shocking way in which the book foreshadows events in the real world. The prologue of Noon has a young man talking about the violent death of his father and it was written by Taseer months before the assassination of his own father in January this year. His father, the late Governor of Punjab in Pakistan, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards; this along with the subsequent kidnapping of one of the Governor's sons (and Aatish Taseer's half-brother), Shahbaaz Taseer is a demonstration of the religious fanaticism that lurks just below the surface of the Pakistan depicted in 'Noon'.
Yet even while ruthlessly exposing the truths of these two societies, the narrator's voice is notable for never losing its immense compassion. This unique and gifted voice is calmer and wiser in 'Noon' than in either of Taseer's remarkable earlier books. Both of them - 'Stranger to History' and 'The Temple-Goers' - are, in different ways, about a young man in search of himself and in search of some of the bigger truths of the world. With 'Noon' Taseer arrives at maturity, proving that he has found his center and is now in a position to share some of the truths of this world.
, Tolerance test for New York.
Since his father's assassination on January 6, 2011 Taseer has written with great insight, and in his characteristically simple and lucid prose, about the situation in Pakistan leading up to and following the incident. These pieces go far beyond the immediate events surrounding his father's murder, exposing the bigger phenomena at play in Pakistani society and are remarkable both for how coolheaded and penetrating they are. A piece for the Telegraph published just two days after, extends his view from the incident, providing a broader understanding of what it all means for Pakistan.
On May 5, 2011, a few days after the death of Osama Bin Laden, Taseer wrote a piece in The Financial Times titled “Pakistan’s Rogue Army Runs a Shattered State”. It was one of the first pieces of journalism to point to the significance of the fact that Bin Laden had been killed in a Pakistani cantonment town, Abbottabad. In the article Taseer states simply that “he was found in this garrison town because he was the guest of the army.” He goes on to unpack the importance of this, saying that the coming-to-light of this fact “represents the moment when perception and reality become one. And what a frightening reality it is: a vast and nuclear-armed military exposed for not just being the enemy of peace in south Asia but probably the ultimate sponsor and protector of terrorism against the west.” The piece ends with this damning paragraph: “This then is the background of bin Laden’s death: a shattered country, traumatised and steeped in blood, with a rogue army falling piecemeal into the hands of jihad. After my father’s assassination, I had begun to feel that the birth of this new terrorist state would not be defined by anything so distinct as a takeover or a revolution but by an infiltration so deep that it would soon be impossible to know where Pakistan began and where terrorism ended. This latest news of the army’s guest in Abbottabad suggests the new state is already at hand.”
On July 16, 2011 The Wall Street Journal published a piece its editors provocatively, and somewhat misleadingly, titled “Why My Father Hated India”. Although Taseer wrote using his father's distaste for all things Indian as an example, or metaphor, the article attempted to explain a much bigger question - a question about Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India. It argued that “to understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge — its hysteria — it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan”, he went on to say that “In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India.” As could be expected, the article ignited a firestorm that consumed internet chat-rooms and set Twitter ablaze. The article remained the most emailed and commented-on on the WSJ website for days and at the end of July it was the by far the most emailed of the month.
The controversy spread when, following an exchange on Twitter between senior Pakistani journalist, Ejaz Haider and Indian Member of Parliament and former Indian Union Minister and Under-secretary at the UN, Shashi Tharoor. Haider wrote a column in The Express Tribune titled “Aatish’s Personal Fire”, accusing Taseer of employing “everything except the kitchen sink in order to construct a supposedly linear reality”. His central argument was that India - with its massive army arrayed along its border with Pakistan - left Pakistan with no choice but to be deeply concerned with its every move. Tharoor rose to Aatish Taseer's defense; writing in the Deccan Chronicle, in a piece titled “Delusional liberals”, he quoted Taseer's original piece extensively and said in general he “admired the young man’s writing”, and felt he had made “his point in language that was both sharp [...] heartfelt and accurate”. He said that in their vitriolic response to Taseer's piece Pakistan's liberals had exposed themselves and took on Haider point-for-point, saying “that there is not and cannot be an “Indian threat” to Pakistan, simply because there is absolutely nothing Pakistan possesses that India wants.” Ejaz Haider subsequently responded to Shashi Tharoor's piece, but the controversy flamed-out after this last salvo.
and London
. He was previously in a relationship with Lady Gabriella Windsor
, daughter of the Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n journalist Tavleen Singh
Tavleen Singh
Tavleen Singh is a noted Indian syndicated columnist and political reporter and writer.-Biography:Singh was born in Mussoorie in 1950 and studied at the Welham Girls School. Later she did a short-term Journalism course from the New Delhi Polytechnic in 1969...
and late Pakistani politician and businessman Salmaan Taseer
Salmaan Taseer
Salmaan Taseer was a Pakistani businessman and politician who served as the 26th governor of the province of Punjab from 2008 until his assassination in early 2011....
.
Early life
Born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
to Salman Taseer and Tavleen Singh
Tavleen Singh
Tavleen Singh is a noted Indian syndicated columnist and political reporter and writer.-Biography:Singh was born in Mussoorie in 1950 and studied at the Welham Girls School. Later she did a short-term Journalism course from the New Delhi Polytechnic in 1969...
. They were unmarried, and separated shortly afterwards. Taseer grew up in New Delhi
New Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
, before going off to a residential school
Kodaikanal International School
Kodaikanal International School is a co-educational independent residential school offering education for grades P-12. It is located on in Kodaikanal, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, South India. Kodaikanal is a hill station at in the Palani Hills, north-west of Madurai.Early alumni of KIS include US...
in Kodaikanal
Kodaikanal
-Climate:Kodaikanal has a monsoon-influenced subtropical highland climate . The temperatures are cool throughout the year due to the high elevation of the city.-Economy:...
. Later he graduated in French and Political Science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
at Amherst College
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
.
Career
Taseer has worked for Time MagazineTime (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, and as a freelance journalist also written for Prospect magazine
Prospect (magazine)
Prospect is a monthly British general interest magazine, specialising in politics and current affairs. Frequent topics include British, European, and US politics, social issues, art, literature, cinema, science, the media, history, philosophy, and psychology...
, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, TAR Magazine and Esquire.
Books
Taseer has written a highly acclaimed translation of Saadat Hasan MantoSaadat Hasan Manto
Saadat Hassan Manto was a short story writer of the Urdu language. He is best known for his short stories, 'Bu' , 'Khol Do' , 'Thanda Gosht' , and his magnum opus, 'Toba Tek Singh'....
's short stories from the original Urdu, Manto: Selected Stories (2008).
His first book Stranger to History : A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands (2009), part memoir-part travelogue, has been translated into more than 14 languages and hailed as a 'must-read' for anyone attempting to understand the Muslim world. The book caught the attention of Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul, who labelled Taseer 'a young writer to watch'. It is a rare endorsement from Naipaul and confirms Taseer's talent.
His first novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was also very well received; it was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa First Novel Award.
A second novel, Noon (2011), has been published by Faber & Faber (USA), Picador (UK and India). It is, for a writer so young, a very incisive and assured novel. It completes what is a trilogy of a sort, even though the first book is not a novel; they all draw from elements of the writer's own turbulent life and complement each other; revealing and adding layers. The episodic structure and spare but fluid prose communicate the jaggedness of the sometimes-main-protagonist/sometimes-narrator, Rehan Tabassum's life. The completeness of 'story' in each episode is set against the deliberately ruptured narrative structure of the novel as a whole, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps. Noon also expresses perhaps more successfully than most non-fiction on the subject, the complexity and contradiction within the societies of India and Pakistan; it reveals the casual cruelty prevalent in one and the perpetually lurking potential for violence in the other. On display in parts of the book is virtuoso storytelling at par with the great Russian writers - the different levels at which wealth and power and talent are at work in a society built on the framework of caste and class; wheels within wheels are laid bare masterfully.
Like Taseer's other two books, there is something ominous about 'Noon'. But a reader's foreboding turns to a kind of baffled amazement once he or she knows the truly shocking way in which the book foreshadows events in the real world. The prologue of Noon has a young man talking about the violent death of his father and it was written by Taseer months before the assassination of his own father in January this year. His father, the late Governor of Punjab in Pakistan, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards; this along with the subsequent kidnapping of one of the Governor's sons (and Aatish Taseer's half-brother), Shahbaaz Taseer is a demonstration of the religious fanaticism that lurks just below the surface of the Pakistan depicted in 'Noon'.
Yet even while ruthlessly exposing the truths of these two societies, the narrator's voice is notable for never losing its immense compassion. This unique and gifted voice is calmer and wiser in 'Noon' than in either of Taseer's remarkable earlier books. Both of them - 'Stranger to History' and 'The Temple-Goers' - are, in different ways, about a young man in search of himself and in search of some of the bigger truths of the world. With 'Noon' Taseer arrives at maturity, proving that he has found his center and is now in a position to share some of the truths of this world.
Journalism
Taseer's opinion pieces have garnered both attention and critical appreciation. David Goodhart draws attention to Taseer's piece on feudal Pakistan, Travels with the mango king in his article Prospect’s 10 Most Influential Articles. More recently he wrote a piece on the controversy surrounding the possible construction of the "Ground Zero Mosque" in ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, Tolerance test for New York.
Since his father's assassination on January 6, 2011 Taseer has written with great insight, and in his characteristically simple and lucid prose, about the situation in Pakistan leading up to and following the incident. These pieces go far beyond the immediate events surrounding his father's murder, exposing the bigger phenomena at play in Pakistani society and are remarkable both for how coolheaded and penetrating they are. A piece for the Telegraph published just two days after, extends his view from the incident, providing a broader understanding of what it all means for Pakistan.
On May 5, 2011, a few days after the death of Osama Bin Laden, Taseer wrote a piece in The Financial Times titled “Pakistan’s Rogue Army Runs a Shattered State”. It was one of the first pieces of journalism to point to the significance of the fact that Bin Laden had been killed in a Pakistani cantonment town, Abbottabad. In the article Taseer states simply that “he was found in this garrison town because he was the guest of the army.” He goes on to unpack the importance of this, saying that the coming-to-light of this fact “represents the moment when perception and reality become one. And what a frightening reality it is: a vast and nuclear-armed military exposed for not just being the enemy of peace in south Asia but probably the ultimate sponsor and protector of terrorism against the west.” The piece ends with this damning paragraph: “This then is the background of bin Laden’s death: a shattered country, traumatised and steeped in blood, with a rogue army falling piecemeal into the hands of jihad. After my father’s assassination, I had begun to feel that the birth of this new terrorist state would not be defined by anything so distinct as a takeover or a revolution but by an infiltration so deep that it would soon be impossible to know where Pakistan began and where terrorism ended. This latest news of the army’s guest in Abbottabad suggests the new state is already at hand.”
On July 16, 2011 The Wall Street Journal published a piece its editors provocatively, and somewhat misleadingly, titled “Why My Father Hated India”. Although Taseer wrote using his father's distaste for all things Indian as an example, or metaphor, the article attempted to explain a much bigger question - a question about Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India. It argued that “to understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge — its hysteria — it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan”, he went on to say that “In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India.” As could be expected, the article ignited a firestorm that consumed internet chat-rooms and set Twitter ablaze. The article remained the most emailed and commented-on on the WSJ website for days and at the end of July it was the by far the most emailed of the month.
The controversy spread when, following an exchange on Twitter between senior Pakistani journalist, Ejaz Haider and Indian Member of Parliament and former Indian Union Minister and Under-secretary at the UN, Shashi Tharoor. Haider wrote a column in The Express Tribune titled “Aatish’s Personal Fire”, accusing Taseer of employing “everything except the kitchen sink in order to construct a supposedly linear reality”. His central argument was that India - with its massive army arrayed along its border with Pakistan - left Pakistan with no choice but to be deeply concerned with its every move. Tharoor rose to Aatish Taseer's defense; writing in the Deccan Chronicle, in a piece titled “Delusional liberals”, he quoted Taseer's original piece extensively and said in general he “admired the young man’s writing”, and felt he had made “his point in language that was both sharp [...] heartfelt and accurate”. He said that in their vitriolic response to Taseer's piece Pakistan's liberals had exposed themselves and took on Haider point-for-point, saying “that there is not and cannot be an “Indian threat” to Pakistan, simply because there is absolutely nothing Pakistan possesses that India wants.” Ejaz Haider subsequently responded to Shashi Tharoor's piece, but the controversy flamed-out after this last salvo.
Personal life
Taseer lives between New DelhiNew Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
and London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He was previously in a relationship with Lady Gabriella Windsor
Lady Gabriella Windsor
The Lady Gabriella Marina Alexandra Ophelia Windsor , known both professionally and personally as Ella Windsor, is an English freelance feature writer, and the only daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent .Her paternal great grandparents were King George V of the United Kingdom and Mary of...
, daughter of the Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
Works
- Manto Selected Stories. Random House. ISBN 8184000499.
- Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, McClelland & Stewart. 2009. ISBN 0771084250.
- Translated from the English: Terra Islamica. Auf der Suche nach der Welt meines Vaters, translated by Rita Seuß, Verlag C.H. Beck, München 2009
- The Temple-Goers, Viking. 2010. ISBN 978-0670918508.
- Noon, Faber & Faber in the US; by Picador in India and the UK. 2011. ISBN 9780865478589.
Awards
- "2010 Costa First Novel Award shortlist" for The Temple-Goers. The Costa Book Awards started, in 1971, as the Whitbread Literary Awards; from 1985 to 2006 they were known as the Whitbread Book Awards.
Interviews
- The Kojo Nnamdi Show, Washington, DC; Radio Interview http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-11-03/noon-using-fiction-explore-pakistans-complex-politics/transcript
- The Nervous Breakdown, London; self-interview http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/category/fiction/
- The Leonard Lopate Show, New York; Radio Interview http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2011/nov/07/aatish-taseer-his-novel-emnoonem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wnyc_home+(WNYC+New+York+Public+Radio)
- Art on Air, New York: Radio Interview http://artonair.org/show/aatish-taseer
- Morning Edition, NPR, New York; Radio Interview http://www.npr.org/2011/09/21/140639203/in-taseers-noon-fictional-violence-is-all-too-real
- Your Call, NDTV, New Delhi; TV Interview http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/your-call-with-aatish-taseer/211870
- Beautiful People, CNBC, New Delhi; TV Interview http://www.moneycontrol.com/video/features/noon-echoes-violence-that-killed-my-father-aatish-taseer_584186.html