The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges - Hardcover

'A young writer to watch.' -- V.S. Naipaul

'[A]n excellent, revelatory, provocative book' -- Hanya Yanagihara

'Taseer sets [his] meditations against a gorgeous, sinister portrait of Benares ... [His] wonderfully atmospheric rendition of landscapes and gnarled social psychologies make for an engrossing dissection of India's discontents.' -- Publishers Weekly

'I love Aatish Taseer's writing: his introspection, his lucid and supple prose, his sensitivity to the interplay of East and West, old and new India. The Twice-Born is a poignant reflection on identity, change and politics on the banks of the Ganges. A moving and thought-provoking read.' --Shashi Tharoor MP, author of Inglorious Empire and Why I Am a Hindu

'The writing has a lyrical quality that makes you want to wander the streets of [Benares] once more. ... The Twice-Born makes the reader think about religion, caste, culture and the idea of modernity, and most rewardingly, about where she stands in relation to all of these.' -- Hindustan Times

'Taseer writes like he always does, relentlessly, intensely, sometimes unkindly, in a complex way, raising questions with a deep intelligence that disturbs more than it quietens.' -- The Telegraph, Calcutta

'the most rewarding [book] written by a contemporary writer on the perpetually romanced--and sacred--geography of India. ... Every encounter here is a story of wonderment and disillusionment ... The Twice-Born ... carries the most elegant sentences written about India by a writer of our time.' --Open magazine

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born--first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation--the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India--and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of 'Victory to Mother India!' and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.