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Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. 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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Also, hope is a discipline. 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. As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. 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. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Suchitra Vijayan. Suchitra Vijayan. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. You can claim to be patriotic but not political, you can claim to support the troops but ignore the ongoing civilian casualty. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. Do you think the future is borderless? Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. Suchitra Vijayan. When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. Bigotry is also big business. 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. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. Rohini Menon for Feminism in India, FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation, Institutional Violence & Political Imagination, 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. Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. News organizations such as India Today, NDTV, News 18, the Indian Express, First Post, Mumbai Mirror, ANI and others routinely attributed their information to anonymous government sources, forensic experts, police officers and intelligence officers. No independent investigations were conducted, and serious questions about intelligence failures were left unanswered. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. Suchitra Vijayans new book, Midnights Borders: A Peoples 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. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. There is no denying that the American media landscape is deeply racist, and while the past few years have seen more brown people take center stage, its nowhere close to where we need to be. Already a subscriber? From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. First, does my work aid the powerful? The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). I dont want to make this about me. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. 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 two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. One of the reasons why this book was written was to step back: to say that this violence that you and I listen to and encounter is not new to say that this violence is not new. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. 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. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Three hundred million people who had been considered less than subjects under the British rule, divided for years by religion, language, class, and caste, would all be united under one book: the revolutionary Constitution given to India by Babasaheb Ambedkar. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. Why the Modi government lies. 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. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . We once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Born and raised in Madras, India, she is the author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York). Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. With sharp political analyses, dense historical research and lyrical, image-rich prose, Vijayans journalism displays an inspiring ethic, one that is invested in the micro-histories of the small man, the one existing on the fringes of history and the one that most requires urgent representation. B, A book that will enlighten every citizen of every nation. Always. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. I think its the other way round, these communities have always been speaking, writing, documenting, teachingwe must simply listen rather than represent them in any way. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. 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. 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. 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? At Fazilka near the Pakistan border, she ran into Sari Begum, who had a bunker on her land but had a darker story of pain and violence from the days of Partition. Creative . 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 pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. 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. 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. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. Over the span of seven years, Suchitra Vijayan interviewed scores of individuals, jotted countless notes, snapped hundreds of photographs, and altogether made herself witness to the manifold absurdities (and atrocities) of who gets to say where one nation ends and another begins. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. 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. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. In her book, she makes her intention clear at the very beginning, claiming that this endeavor is not to give voice to the voiceless but to critique the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty. She acknowledges that a book in its limited scope cannot really encapsulate the entirety of this journey, and it will remain more of a scrapbook, a collection of images, texts, poetry, and maps. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. 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? 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. 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. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 09:35, Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer Telugu, 2nd South Indian International Movie Awards, "Suchitra going through certain emotional condition: Husband Karthik on her tweets", "Will Trisha sound like Trisha in Mankatha? However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. She is currently working on her first novel. Fearful of the future he asked quietly, Where did all this hate come from, where is it going to take us? echoing what many residents had told her. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. Take a look at theseevents: The vast infrastructure of detention centers being built in Assam and outside; a politician from a ruling party incites violence by saying, goli maaro saalon ko, and remains free; a minister, a Harvard educated technocrat, garlands and celebrates men for the grave crime of lynching; Dr Teltumbde and other BK 16 [the 16 arrests made in the Bhima Koregaon case] political prisoners remain incarcerated with little, no or manufactured evidence for being dissenting subjects; and a standup comic is arrested for the crime of existing as a Muslim. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for humanising terrorists. 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. 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.. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. All rights reserved. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. I dont have apprehensions. 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. 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. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. What do you think the future holds? Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. He writes TPS reports for an overbearing boss who calls him the minimum guy. He has replaced eating vada pav at ungodly hours on the streets with overpriced salads. 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. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. How violence against women and girlsand even how sexual violence against men and boys (something we dont even talk about enough) is depictedis all seriously problematic. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. [1] Career [ edit] One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. As a spy working for TASC, Tiwari has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. 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. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. 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. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. Its a practice. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). 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. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. 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? Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. India shares borders with a host of . Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. 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. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? 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. At the end of it, I felt that I learnt more about myself, more about my home, I had becomeif not a better writer, an infinitely better human being, which is to say that one realises that theres always a Longue dure that one needs to consider, crave out time and space to think, train oneself not to always react. @suchitrav. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? So I try to learn and listen, and again, as I say in this book, "It is not my goal to 'bear witness' or 'give voice to the voiceless'. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. 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. Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. She has a sister named, Sunitha. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: 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. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. Feminism In India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist media organisation to learn, educate and develop a feminist sensibility among the youth. 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. And, in many cases, they are children of the literary, cultural, or political elite who have long been the beneficiaries of the Indian state. 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. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. She lives in New York. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. So now, how do we respond to this? Not mine. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. Barrister.

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