The Demands of Belonging

The event, “The Demands of Belonging,” featured a profound dialogue between acclaimed authors Aatish Taseer and Karan Mahajan, expertly moderated by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi. In her opening remarks, Oloomi set the stage by establishing that the “unresolvable question of authenticity and belonging in the context of exile is the axis around which” the authors’ work turns. This central theme guided a conversation that navigated the intricate connections between personal history, political reality, and the craft of writing.
The authors detailed how their work connects intimate, personal experiences to the vast, impersonal forces of history. Taseer recounted the shock of having his Indian citizenship revoked by the Modi government, a crucible that informs his explorations of identity in A Return to Self. He described his instinctive relationship with the country as forming “the unstructure of my creative life, a kind of zero point,” a geographic and existential orientation whose loss is profoundly disorienting. Similarly, Mahajan’s novel The Association of Small Bombs uses a fictional tragedy in Delhi to explore the lingering trauma of the 1947 Partition of India. Moderator Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi highlighted a key passage from the novel that captures this sentiment, where a character understands that “for every India a Pakistan of possibilities,” illustrating how historical ruptures fragment personal history.
A central concept explored was the “split self”—the fractured identity of the exile. Mahajan provided a powerful illustration by reading from his upcoming novel, The Complex, in which the protagonist, navigating a life between two families, feels herself become “doubled,” inhabiting the consciousness of others because she “can’t bear to be inside my own self.” This fictional rendering resonated with the authors’ real-world discussion of having parts of their identities become “dormant” depending on whether they are in the United States or India.
The dialogue then deconstructed the ways national identity is politically constructed and weaponized. Taseer offered a nuanced distinction between his relationship with India and the US. In India, he argued, a deep and “uncritical sense of belonging” grants one the absolute “right to criticize,” a right he does not feel he has earned in America. Mahajan contrasted this with his own feeling of having a persistent “sojourner’s attitude” towards US politics, an emotional distance that remains despite years of residency.
In their final thoughts, the writers moved beyond a simple narrative of colonial blame. Taseer, in particular, challenged what he called an intellectually “dead end”—the idea that historical traumas were “all done to us.” He argued for acknowledging his own society’s “capacity for hatred,” reframing the conversation around historical agency. This led to Mahajan’s concluding challenge for contemporary writers and citizens alike: navigating a fractured world and finding a way “to be whole without resorting to fictions.”
The conversation offered a masterclass in navigating the complexities of identity in a world defined by migration and political turmoil, as further distilled in the key takeaways below.