And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. Its about what people like me should do. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? In that process, her reportage unravels the cultural and political implicationsof our bordersonour 'collective conscience', as capricious as that might be, and on the lives of those sandwiched between two warring nations. Even as 70% of the border with Bangladesh has been fenced, smugglers, drug couriers, human traffickers and cattle rustlers continue to cross to ply their trades. All along the border, the common refrain is, It feels like Partition is still alive., A story from near Jalpaiguri in north Bengal, that of a man named Ali, is heartbreaking. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST I cant think in terms of the future being borderless, I can only think in terms of fracturing. There are already about 20 million climate refugees around South Asias borderlands. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Its a practice. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. Often, we settle comfortably into describing things as communal riots instead of saying that it was a state-abetted violence, a pogrom, or a brutal massacre. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. What is the function of seeing and documenting? Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. In her15,000-kilometre journey, spread over seven years, Vijayan mulls over the meaning of freedom, belongingness in a land of imagined communities, created by territorial demarcations. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. While that incident had a profound impact on me, my politics, how I think about violence, its relationship to justice, or the lack of it, this is not the same kind of violence Kashmiris have been subjugated to. Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the worlds largest democracy and second most populous country. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). She was part of a music band at PSG. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. India shares borders with a host of . It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. A: This is a very loaded question. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. The publishing landscape, including Indian publishing, is deeply flawedit is upper class, upper caste, and deeply alienating for anyone who doesnt come from already established and existing networks of privilege. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. Then you sit in a room with a mother telling you that she has no idea what happened to her son and has no way of knowing if hes ever coming back. 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Suchitra Vijayan's new book, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, takes a deep look at such stories by prioritizing the experiences of the silenced victims as well as lesser-known accounts from victims of state violence. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Rumpus: I believe your book contributes to an important conversation about India we must have right now in the United States, for its own sake. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. We play an ever more important role in these times when there is a fascist authoritarian regime in India and a deeply racist police state in the US. What do these events have in common? She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. More importantly, reporters need to engage with what it means to administer what has been called the worlds most militarized zone. Only then can the country answer a more fundamental question: Just what should be done to create conditions that allow Kashmiris to choose their destiny? 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. I wanted to make sure that I was writing in a way that was honest and true to my initial reactions, and capture that without centering myself. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. So here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. There is something deeply flawed in the way we live today. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. @suchitrav. [6], She wrote a short story, a graphic illustration of an episode in the life of a black peppercorn called Kuru-Milaku, called "The Runaway Peppercorn".[7]. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. That was my starting point. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Not everyone lived to see its promises. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. Midnights Borders , Suchitra Vijayan includes a photo of the pillar, which becomes a cricket stump for boys on either side of the border most days. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. She lucidly explains the complicated history of the McMahon Line, how the India-China border is the result of a fabrication perpetuated by the British colonial administration. Suchitra Vijayan. A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe set foot in India for the first time in July, 1947 to draw the borders and completed the task within seven weeks, engendering communal riots, a heavily militarized border, four wars and seven decades of violence and hatred between the two countries. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. You will see very little critical commentary or public positions on Hindutva, its corrosive role in India, or how RSS works here in the USfunding and now interfering in US elections. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. The show deals with interesting international happenings. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. The revolutionary Constitution not only created a social world made of contradictions, but it very soon became the tool of suppressing dissent, deployed laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and Public Safety Act (PSA) in Kashmir. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. We cant continue to see this in neo-liberal terms like stakeholder. I think the usage of this kind of language is ineffectual; its emptied of imagination. Why the Modi government lies. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. Even as 70% of the border with Bangladesh has been fenced, "smugglers, drug couriers, human traffickers and cattle rustlers continue to cross to ply their. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. As Sari Begum's story [in the book] illustrates, 'A life where the violence of the border is not at the fence, or in the trenches, but at the center of 'their' and our 'universe'. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. In Midnight's Borders, barrister, political analyst, and writer Suchitra Vijayan documentsmany such telling accounts of lives both growing and barely getting by alongIndian borderlands. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. So now, how do we respond to this? Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. [1] Career [ edit] We need more writers from Indias Northeast, Kashmir, Indigenous, Dalit, and Muslim communities to tell stories that help complete the canvas of narratives about India. She is not alone. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. Some of the oldest resistances in our nation are those communities who have been fighting for their own homes from militarisation who seek to exploit their mineral rich home land for mining. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Your email address will not be published. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. It took a long time to get the voice right. Required fields are marked *. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. Her career as a playback singer now spans Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam films and she has several hits in all these languages to her credit. . A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. You can claim to be patriotic but not political, you can claim to support the troops but ignore the ongoing civilian casualty. IWE is a body of work where the voices of Indias marginalized are still kept on the fringes; Midnights Borders is anarrative nonfiction book depicting a world that novels from mainland India have failed to depict. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. In the popular depictions of India circulating in the US, we rarely see the stories that the nations jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. I want to clarify that what I witnessed or the violence inflicted on my father is not the same as what over eight million Kashmiris have endured. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. Second, there were times when I ran out of money, when some said that such a book would not be published, when some declared that such a book could not be written. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. There are two quotes I regularly use by Allan Sekula when I teach: "The making of a human likeness on film is a political act. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliots, Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves, RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris, The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. A literary community. We perform rituals of freedom in a right-less societywe dont ask if the rules, laws, and policies that are put in place are fair, just, right or equitable. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. The government, of course, denies this. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. While Border Pillar No 1 becomes a convenient stump for children playing cricket along the land that India shares with Bangladesh, roughly 2000 kilometers away in Punjab a woman farmer watches on as the army builds a bunker on the few acres of land she owns. Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. A Barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to . Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). I dont want to make this about me. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. Suchitra Vijayan's debut book, Midnight's Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.The book recounts the author's recent journey across India's land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years. These instances are also about border practices because modern states, especially liberal democracies, expend immense energy in creating and maintaining identity categories: who belongs, and where. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. You've mentioned in the text that you've spent your entire adult life thinking about state violence and justice because of a troubling incident in 1994 when your father was attacked. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? 'Music I Like', an album of Suchitra's renditions of Mahakavi Bharatiyaar's poetry, set to contemporary tunes and music, released by Universal Music, was a turning point in her career. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. She studied Law, Political Science and International Relations, and was trained as a Barrister-at-Law and called to Bar at the Honourable Society of Inner Temple. Instead, the Indian media has ascribed to itself the role of an amplifier of the government propaganda that took two nuclear states to the brink of war. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? The events in Hathras did not happen at the border; neither did the murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Q: Speaking about the content of the work, by including under-represented perspectives on the frequently debated partition and border laws you present a novel perspective to journalistic canon. First, does my work aid the powerful? The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. That changes how you write and photograph a place. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence that India has committed in its borderlandsinjustice that has irrigated the glamour and prosperity we witness in what some of us in those borderlands call mainland India. Vijayan, a barrister by profession, is a founding director of Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization in New York. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. For instance, a border security personnel tells her how he failed to capture a photograph of a porcupine after spending half an hour trying to fit a helmet on its head, because he is bored and lonely. The Indian government bears some responsibility for this: Amid this brinkmanship between the two nuclear powers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. Author, lawyer and journalist, Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Cerebration editor Smita Maitra on her book Midnight's Borders, maps, fragmented identities and postcolonial nation-states. Those notes were raw and immediate. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. During the initial search, the BSF troops recovered a black coloured drone - DJI Matrice (made in China), in partially damaged condition, lying near Dhussi Bundh near Shahjada village. The book is a prelude to what was coming, and is also a impassioned plea to my readers to ask some fundamental questions of what it means to live in a country like Indiawhat is the function of a state when its primary preoccupation is no longer the citizen but a performance of an ideology? How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? Feminism In India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist media organisation to learn, educate and develop a feminist sensibility among the youth. This is the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and is the author of The House With a Thousand Stories, His Fathers Disease, and There Is No Good Time for Bad News. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. Its easy for Indian Americans and diaspora Desis to become tokens who speak of diversity but not equity or representation, talk of caste as culture and whitewash Hindutva. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade I have no control over what comes next. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border.
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