An Indian son’s search for his Pakistani father and his Muslim legacy
Part memoir, part journalism, Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History is a brave book. It is also extremely significant because it heralds the long-required candour among young, more adventurous authors who do not hesitate to lay bare family secrets, especially if they help understand a greater phenomenon. For Taseer, the clear starting point of the book is the search for his identity: the anomaly of a Muslim with a Pakistani father growing up in a Sikh family in India.

The actual unbridgeable divide which separates his parents, living in different countries, is symbolic of Partition, and its tragic ramifications. It is a schism Taseer is not comfortable with — and the absent yet indifferent father makes the pain even more acute. The fact that his father apparently feels neither guilt nor remorse that he had abandoned his child becomes a recurring theme in the book. In fact, it is only after Taseer has written an article about Pakistan and the London bombings that his father is driven to acknowledge his son, and that too, to chastise him severely. There is a peculiar mendacity in the relationship — which Taseer pushes to a larger political level, ie, obvious parallels are drawn between Pakistan holding India responsible for all its ills and declining international status. This is where the significance of the book begins to blur. Is this the story of a child spurned or is this real politic? After all, this is also a deeply disturbing story of a child, who is a stranger both to his Muslim legacy and his own personal history. The confusion becomes greater when the latter viewpoint begins to obscure the journalistic quality of the book, which indeed is far more revealing and detailed than the personal story. However, the thinly glimpsed emotional history is often allowed to dominate — and so we do not even see a reproduction of the so-called incendiary article that pushed Taseer senior to upbraid his son.

... contd.