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The Twice-born

By Aatish Taseer

 599.00 inclusive of all taxes

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About the book

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, 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, the holy city of death, 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. 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.The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer’s prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.

Pages: 256

Available in:

Language: English

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Aatish Taseer

Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of the memoir Stranger to History and three acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, The Temple-Goers and Noon. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York.

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