It is also the site of the worlds biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its peopleespecially those living in disputed border regions. 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. The images, however, are not all bereft of hope, as children from both India and Bangladesh use a border pillar as a cricket stump, while men on opposing sides of the war on terror in Afghanistan gather around in a cold evening, smoking and sharing stories. After her Twitter page was hacked in 2016, and the pictures and videos released by the hacker went viral under #suchileaks, following a spate of bad press owing to the fact that she only released a statement on Sun News saying she was focused on shutting the page down, Suchitra left for London to pursue culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". They continue to. 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. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations 'The border making project is central to the capitalist and neoliberal logic,' Vijayan says. In this podcast, Vijayan discusses with host Alex Woodson her 9,000-mile journey through India's borderlands, which formed the basis of the book, and she discusses the violent and continuing history of the 1947 partition, the stark differences and similarities along South Asia's various borders, and what "citizenship" mean in India in 2021 and Travel to States like Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in the Northeast which share borders with China and Myanmar required Inner Line Permits, BSF soldiers followed her everywhere on the West Bengal/ Bangladesh border, and in Kashmir she was summoned to meet the local inspector at Uri. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) 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. No one can write a book alone. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. 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. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. The taxi driver who describes the Egyptian revolution in five minutes to an American columnist (who speaks no Arabic) is sadly where the genre is today. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. The second season of The Family Man begins with Srikant Tiwari, a former intelligence officer of TASCa fictitious intelligence agency akin to the Research & Analysis Wingworking at an IT company. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. 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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. It has taken me over a decade to get here. 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. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). Now, along with the medias legitimization of an ideology that promotes violence including riots and lynchings its performance after Pulwama leaves severe doubts as to whether it is engaged in journalism or the propagation of Hindu majoritarianism. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. 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. Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. 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. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. J.G.P. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? Vijayan researches meticulously into official documents and conducts a series of interviews in an effort to uncover the murky truths behind the death of Hilal Ahmed Mir, a supposed militant killed by the military in an encounter in the disputed territory of Kashmir, or Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who was shot when trying to cross the barbed wire at the porous India-Bangladesh border. You can find them on, The #GBVinMedia Campaign: Media Reportage Of Gender-Based Violence, #IndianWomenInHistory: Remembering The Untold Legacies of Indian Women, How To Write About Abortion: A Rights-Based Approach, The Crowdsourced List Of Social Justice Collectives Across Indian Campuses. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. I have two tests. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? Sometimes the news is the story. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. Where India ends and Bangladesh begins is a question confused by history, family and the border pillars themselves. Panitar has a one-foot-high concrete block on the side of the mighty Ichamati river marked Border Pillar No.1. Some things are just not discussed anymore. Midnights Borders perhaps also critiques the widely read body of work available as Indian English Writing (IWE), a literary canon that has so far told the story of India but seldom demonstrated social responsibility by acknowledging the atrocities India has committed silently within its borders. Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. Those notes were raw and immediate. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. Atmany points in Midnight's Borders, we see several men in positions of power view the women, who cross over from the 'other' side, as violable. This is a challenging task for the writer. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. So now, how do we respond to this? Are you expecting any pushback at all? I had a very stable home to come back to. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. 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. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. 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 matters is that the book exists. Q: You had to deal with a lot of ethical considerations as a writer and photographer, which echo throughout your and your fellow journalists work, as evaluated in your book. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. Already a subscriber? Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. 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. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. This book ate into so much of my life. The word terrorism, for instance, is used almost exclusively to refer to a particular communitybut fails to refer to state-enabled terror or the terror deployed by majority communities. They dont. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. I can see how religious Hindu fanaticism has started to spread its tentacles in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, and this is primarily because of an absence of balanced stories about India. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. Is that a probable solution? Its a vicious cycle. It offers brief historical notes on how the nations current borders came into force alongside accounts of increasing militarisation, disputes, little massacres and forgotten pogroms, no-mans-lands, and the people through whom the border runs like barbed wire. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . Be it the teenager who is offered guns, money, and M&M candies to fight the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or Ali, who seeks solace in darkness as the floodlights installed on his plot of land along the India-Bangladesh border leaves him traumatized, or the nonagenarian Johinder Singh Suj from Sindh (a province in present-day Pakistan), who still cherishes his school geography textbook that shows a map of undivided British India the people are captured with deep empathy and come alive in her narration with the adept use of dialogue. 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. A t a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayan's Midnight's Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of India's nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. 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. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? ). I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. She completed her MFA in Writing (Fiction) from the University of San Francisco where she was awarded the Jan Zivic Fellowship and is about to begin her PhD in English with a Creative Dissertation from the University of Georgia, Athens. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. At a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayans Midnights Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of Indias nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. 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. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. India and the US are discussing the possibility of jointly developing and manufacturing an extended-range variant of the M777 ultra lightweight howitzer, Qin's first in-person meeting with EAM Jaishankar came on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers conclave in New Delhi amid the over 34-month-long border row in eastern Ladakh. Suchitra Vijayan: The Indian state has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether its the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland Now the international viewfor instance while the Gujarat riots of 2002 brought critical international media attention and criticism, and [current Prime Minister] Modi was banned from entering the US, India was able to effectively manage global public opinion. You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) The complexities of the Naga peace process were apparent on a visit to remote villages of Tuensang district where many of the women remained silent with others admitting they had never encountered an outsider, except Indian soldiers. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Through these real histories of the people, she gives readers another perspective on old wounds like Partition and new divisionary tactics like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. Sign in. Suchitra Vijayan. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. In Nellie (Assam) too, where over 3,000 Muslims were killed in 1983, people stared at Vijayan in confusion, no one comes here anymore, she was told. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. A relatively small group of people runs it. The controversy surrounding the Rafale deal and allegations of corruption against the government were suddenly sidelined, as was the order for the eviction of more than a million forest dwellers (that was later stayed) and a hearing on the repeal of an important constitutional clause before the Supreme Court. 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. It is truly the treason of the intellectuals. We could have attributed this to ignorance even a few years back; now its just silence thats deeply complicit in the Hindutva project. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia In this era when Indian armed forces and the police act with absolute impunity, a handful of local news outlets play an essential role in reporting and. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. Stallings, Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation.

Examples Of Ethos In I Have A Dream Speech, Broadway Musical Monologues, Monster Legends Breeding Chart 2020, Articles S