My parents met in Delhi in 1980. My father had just written a biography of his political idol, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; my mother was sent to interview him. That night they went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant called the House of Ming. Then they disappeared together for a week. Not long after my father left India, my mother discovered she was pregnant. There was no question of keeping the baby. The bad blood between India and Pakistan was not an abstract thing: my mother’s Sikh family had lost everything during the 1947 Partition and had come as refugees to Delhi. For my mother now to be pregnant by a citizen of that enemy country was unthinkable, not to mention that my father was married at the time, with three small children. In a week when my mother had gone to an abortion clinic with a girlfriend, my father called unexpectedly from the Marbella Club in Dubai. She told him what happened, and by the end of their conversation, according to her telling, he had persuaded her to keep the baby – me. They had no plan beyond cobbling together a partially secret life, spent between London and Dubai. It lasted two years and ended badly. In 1982, my mother returned to India, where she reported on conflict – the secessionist movement in Punjab, the insurgency in Kashmir, civil war in Sri Lanka, the election and downfall of Benazir Bhutto. My father had returned to Pakistan to fight military dictatorship alongside Bhutto, suffering jail and torture. The last time they met was in 1990, during a general election that Bhutto lost, and wherein my father apparently tried to seduce my mother again.

The loss of my country was literal on one level – I could not go back to India – but also abstract: the loss of an idea, that “exalted” idea of a secular India. India, as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, vowed, was not meant to be a “Hindu Pakistan.” Rather, it was to be a place that cherished the array of religions, languages, ethnicities, and cultures that had taken root over fifty centuries. Nehru’s idea of India as a palimpsest, where “layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer has completely hidden or erased what has been written previously,” served as the foundation for the modern republic, born of British colonial rule in 1947. The new country redefined secularism, away from the French idea of laïcité, to mean – as the parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor told me in 2019 – “the existence of a profusion of religions, all of which were allowed and encouraged by the state to flourish.” The idea of India was a historical recognition that over time – and not always peacefully – a great diversity had collected on the Indian subcontinent. The modern republic, as a reflection of that history, would belong not to any one group, but to all groups in equal measure.

As a young man, discovering Pakistan for the first time, I had missed that Indian variety. The sudden imposition of homogeneity upon a composite culture was a shock. It affected values, and the assumption of homogeneity in my father’s house – the jibes against Hindus, Jews, gays, Blacks, and Americans, the language untempered by the awareness of others – was more alien to me than anything else. 

In India, I suppose I always knew that beneath the topsoil of the modern country, a mere seven decades old, there lay an older reality, embodied in the word Bharat, which evokes the idea of India as a holy land, belonging specifically to its 85 percent Hindu majority. India and Bharat – these two words for the same place represent a core tension within the nation. Bharat is Sanskrit, and the name by which India knows herself in her own languages, free of the gaze of outsiders. India is Latin, and its etymology alone – the Sanskrit sindhu for “river,” turning into hind in Persian, and then into indos in Greek, meaning the Indus – reveals a long history of seeing oneself through Western eyes. India is a land; Bharat is a people – the Hindus. India is historical; Bharat is mythical. India is an overarching and inclusionary idea; Bharat is atavistic, emotional, exclusionary.

It was this tension between modern country and holy land – that the founder of Hindu nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, took aim at in the early twentieth century. As he wrote in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, “To be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also as his Holy Land.” This Hindu person was, in Savarkar’s view, the paramount Indian citizen. Everyone else was at best a guest and at worst the bastard child of foreign invasion.

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Growing up in 1980s India, in a westernized enclave where, to quote Edward Said, the “main tenet was that everything of consequence either had happened or would happen in the West,” I had no idea of this other wholeness called Bharat. That ignorance of Hindu ways and beliefs was not mine alone, but symptomatic of the English-speaking elite, which, in imitation of the British colonial classes, lived in isolation from the country around them. Mohandas Gandhi, at the 1916 opening of Banaras Hindu University, a project that was designed to bridge the distance between Hindu tradition and Western-style modernity, worried that India’s “educated men” were becoming “foreigners in their own land,” unable to speak to the “heart of the nation.” Working closely with Nehru, Gandhi had been a great explainer, continually translating what came from outside into Indian idiom and tradition.

By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life – poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools their children attended set them at a great remove from India, on the levels of language, religion, and culture. Every feature of their life was designed, to quote Robert Byron on the English in India, to blunt their “natural interest in the country and sympathy with its people.” Their life was, culturally speaking, an adjunct to Western Europe and America; their values were a hybrid, in which India was served nominally while the West was reduced to a source of permissiveness and materialism. They thought they lived in a world where the “idea of India” reigned supreme – but all the while, the constituency for this idea was being steadily eroded. It was Bharat that was ascendant. India’s leaders today speak with contempt of the principles on which this young nation was founded. They look back instead to the timeless glories of the Hindu past. They scorn the “Khan Market gang” – a reference to a fashionable market near where I grew up that has become a metonym for the Indian elite. Hindu nationalists trace a direct line between the foreign occupiers who destroyed the Hindu past – first Muslims, then the British – and India’s westernized elite (and India’s Muslims), whom they see as heirs to foreign occupation, still enjoying the privileges of plunder.

Almost thirty years ago, in the preface to his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie, fearful of the “religious militancy” threatening “the foundations of the secular state,” had expressed alarm that “there is no commonly used Hindustani word for ‘secularism’; the importance of the secular ideal in India has simply been assumed, in a rather unexamined way.” As it happens, the exalted idea of India has no commonly used translation either. Rushdie was saying that this is not merely a failure of language, but an expression of the isolation of an elite that thought its power was inviolable. “And yet,” Rushdie wrote, “if the secularist principle were abandoned, India could simply explode.”

Excerpted with permission from A Return To Self: Excursions in Exile, by Aatish Taseer, Catapult (2025).