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    The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges
    The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges
    The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges

    Written by Aatish Taseer

    Narrated by Neil Shah

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, 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, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMar 5, 2019
    ISBN9781684571994
    Author

    Aatish Taseer

    Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009), The Temple-Goers (2010), which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon (2011). He lives between London and Delhi.

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    Reviews for The Twice-Born

    3.5/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 1/5
      When you read the title of the book you expect something interesting. It’s just a dishonest commentary of one’s personal views and author being dishonest about his religion and sexuality with characters who has met and written about.
    • 5/5
      The author straddles many fracture lines: Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan in the subcontinent, western education and Indian cultural roots, and so on. He makes an honest attempt to come to India, to access the Hindu-Indian-traditional part of his civilizational heritage, and that too to the centre of traditional Hindu, Sanskrit learning, the Brahmins of Banaras in the Ganges valley. Here he meets up with both men on the street (Brahmins of the present age), as well as tradition-bound scholars, some of them schooled strictly in the traditional ways, and some who know also the world of modern linguistic and philosophical scholarship. But he is defeated, ultimately, by the lack of self-awareness, the mistaken conviction that the scriptures contain all knowledge, the absence of a critical understanding of what the British (and for that matter the Muslim) interludes and interactions have meant, and the lack of any future prospects for the purely backward-looking world view of his contacts. He decides he is better off in the west, where there is an element of rationality and more productive civilizational values of the Enlightenment and the respect for the individual. In this, he confirms the reaction that most modern English-schooled Indians have to the uglier manifestations of the current Hindutva movement in India.