ИСТИНА

The paper focuses on the issue of belonging as depicted by a British-born journalist and writer Aatish Taseer in his travelogue-cum-memoir A Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands (2009) and novel Noon (2011). Son of an Indian Sikh mother and a Pakistani Muslim father, he’s been in search of own place and identity trying to find both through comprehension of his father’s country and religion. The same largely refers to his replica Rehan Tabassum, the central figure of Noon. Aatish’s and his protagonist’s attempts to understand religious messages naturally come to the forefront of both the travelogue and, to a lesser extent, the novel, but do not happen to give either of them any feeling of belonging or security. What seems to work is their real and/or imaginary affiliation with ancestral territory, the multicultural Punjab currently shared by two countries, which represents an elucive „other space“, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. The paper has been prepared under the South Asia: Territory and Belonging in the Historical Perspective project supported by the Russian Foundation for the Humanities (RGNF), grant #13-01-00096.