Aatish Taseer

The Rootless Elysium

America at 250, A Journey

From the author of A Return to Self comes an intimate meditation on identity and migration set against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary that asks: in a nation built on motion and reinvention, can one ever truly feel at home?

Soon after becoming an American citizen, Aatish Taseer sets out from Chicago in a hulking Dodge Charger with no plan but a deadline: to reach the Pacific in ten days. What begins as a classic road trip along Route 66 quickly becomes something more searching and unsettled—a journey across a country, and into the fault lines of belonging itself.

Raised in India, shaped by life in the United Kingdom, and now rooted—uneasily—in the United States, Taseer travels west through small towns, fading cities, and vast interiors, encountering strangers whose lives refract the central question that haunts him: what does it mean to belong to a place that prides itself on being free of the past? 

Moving between personal history and cultural inquiry, this is a meditation on migration, identity, and the fragile idea of America as a “creedal nation.” Along the way, Taseer confronts the competing seductions of rootlessness and rootedness, the persistence of race and history beneath a myth of new beginnings, and the uneasy realization that exile is no longer temporary.

The Rootless Elysium is a thrilling update to the American road trip, mapping the country’s many complications and contradictions from the inside out. Taseer transforms our highways and geographies into thresholds that reveal and recontextualize the country’s spirit, with a chorus of artists and authors lighting the road ahead. It’s a bottle rocket of a book: slim, powerful, and illuminating everything in its path.

A Return to Self

Excursions in Exile

Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Nonfiction

A blend of travelog and memoir spanning from Turkey to Mexico, exploring Aatish Taseer’s uniquely blended identity and asking: Why do certain cities become epicenters of great historical shifts and sites of unpredictable communities?

In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi revoked Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity, and asking broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and a nationality, in the process. 

In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist façade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated there, is so little practiced. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them? 

In thoughtful prose that combines reportage with romanticism, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes an unstable, politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and gets to the human heart of the shifts and migrations that define our multicultural world.