March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. The emotional cost is something else altogether. They cannot be abusive or personal. More than two weeks after the attack, our analysis finds that no news site had rectified the errors in their reporting, leaving these misleading facts as a matter of public record. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. J.G.P. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. 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. 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. 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. Subscribe here. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. This is a challenging task for the writer. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Ananya is a chaotic humanities student with a deep interest in the relationship between art and society, a writing obsession, and way too many bizarre ideas involving their camera. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. In Assam, Vijayan met people devastated by the National Register of Citizens process, with names of long-time residents missing from the final list, and in Kashmir she spent time with a family mourning the loss of their son in an encounter. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and . Already a subscriber? While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. 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. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. All rights reserved. The argument put forward was simple: India, like most countries, had its human rights violations, but these were characterized as the growing pains and maturation of the worlds largest democracy. 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. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. Its been a little over a week since the book came out, and every day this week, I have woken up to emails, messages, and DMs from readers. Can you write about loss without living? is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Many news channels are not only owned, operated or invested in by politically influential families, but also are sometimes run for the express purpose of advancing party positions. Creative . Sometimes they are no more, but your storytelling is so invigorating that the reader doesnt forget them. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. 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. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. Suchitra Vijayan. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Part of this learning was also why photographer Asim Rafiqui and I created the free UN/DO Photography workshops to think about image-making in relationship to power. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . The border runs through him, his friend Jamshed had told Vijayan, He is almost gone, but I dont want his story to be gone too.. [1] Career [ edit] What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. 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. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. As a spy working for TASC, Srikant Tiwari, played by Manoj Bajpayee, has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. Copyright 2023. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. We need more such books. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Not mine. My role, then, and this books role, is to find in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty.". The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. Founder & ExecDirector: @project_polis @watchthestate ; Teach @nyugallatin Writer Manhattan, NY linktr.ee/suchitravijayan Born April 14 Joined May 2008 8,013 Following 80.8K Followers Tweets & replies No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. As a graduate student at Yale, she researched and documented stories along the Af-Pak border and was embedded with the US forces in Afghanistan. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. But Pakistan responded by rejecting these claims and told the Associated Press that the area was mostly deserted wooded area and that there were no casualties or damage on the ground. 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. Sometimes the news is the story. Like most women, I learnt to navigate this toxic misogyny, the threat of sexual violence, and patriarchy by merely existing as a dark-skinned woman in this country. It took a long time to get the voice right. 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. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. Its a practice. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. How does one think of violence, how does one make sense of all this, how does one retain a sense ofnot exactly humanity, but ratherempathy for the other? Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. 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. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. . Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" What do you think the future holds? L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. 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. 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? The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. In her new book 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. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. 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. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. 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. Again, in the India-China border, she finds a young army officer closely referring to a book that contradicts the official version of the Indo-China war of 1962, and concludes that perhaps, he recognizes that most of soldiering involved cynical subordination to ideas that no longer made sense.. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. First, does my work aid the powerful? 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. 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'. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. You need a community of people to support you. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. ). History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles was grievously underreported. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? 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. suchitrav. 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. A place to read, on the Internet. 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. They dont. How do you think this shapes climate justice? Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. 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. I spoke with Suchitra by email in July about Midnights Borders, the power of literary nonfiction, new possibilities of Indian American literature, neoliberal politics, and the importance of supporting underrepresented stories. Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. 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. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. Contributions for the charitable purposes ofThe Rumpus must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. What do words like democracy, freedom, and citizenship mean? He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. She lives in New York. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. 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. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. I find that profoundly inspiring. 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. 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. 2:16. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. 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. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . 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. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. 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. Suchitra was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. Vijayan has travelled 9,000 miles over seven 7 across India's borderline remote areas and has collected many bone-chilling, painful, myth-breaking stories of the people caught in between inter-state disputes because of the lines created by colonial powers who ruled over us for . The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? We see that during the journey, in a number of places, people stood in lines to speak with you, to show their paperwork to youhow did you negotiate the weight ofthose expectations, which might not have been explicit, but were still very much present? Bigotry is also big business. Francesca Recchia, a researcher and writer and former director of the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, is the editor and creative director of The Polis Project.. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister, researcher and the author of "Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India." She is the executive director of the Polis Project. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. 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. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade The Indian media must learn to portray the conflict and human rights violations in the region in a more nuanced way, and not reduce Kashmir to a catalogue of death, destruction and emergency laws. It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. 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. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. In this stunning work of narrative reportagefeaturing over 40 original photographswe hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-mans-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. But the number of anonymous sources willing to disclose classified and conflicting information to reporters who cited them without corroboration points to a serious crisis in how information is reported to the public. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? 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. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. Vijayan: As we have this conversation, Dr. Stan Swamy, the eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest, Indias oldest political prisoner, was murdered by the Indian state with the complicity of the judiciary. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. As an attorney, 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 Iraqi refugees. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. FII Media Private Limited | All rights reserved, "Imagine how it would be for someone coming from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, working class background, who wants to come into thisit is especially difficult if youre a woman coming from these backgrounds.