Aatish Taseer Interviewed by Boyd Tonkin

Novelist Aatish Taseer talks about his search for the Brahmins and his attempt to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.

Brahmins are known as the twice-born and are a caste devoted to learning. Taseer visits Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism. There he describes a clash between globalised modernity and the ancient customs and a rise in nationalism driven by a brutal caste system. And he confronts his own myths about himself, his past and his own countries past and new.

Taseer was born to an Indian journalist and a Pakastani politician and raised among Delhi’s intellectual elite. He now lives in New Delhi and New York and is author of the memoir Stranger to History and the novels The Way Things Were and The Temple-Goers. Here he talks to writer and critic Boyd Tonkin, who writes on arts and books for the Financial Times, the Economist and Spectator, and is special adviser to the Man Booker International Prize (which he chaired in 2016).