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 I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. How did writing this book affect you? 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. I still do. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Commentary Politics. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. 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. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. . In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. 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. 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. 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. 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 are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. 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. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. Despite the failures in investigation and prosecution related to criminal trials arising out of the pogrom, the judiciary has projected itself as an able and willing neutral arbiter of justice that is not complicit with the deep structures of Hindutvas anti-Muslim prejudice https://t.co/EFf5bxYEBt, True societal change has always emerged from the ground-up, with communities fighting for their own freedom and dignity. ", "Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidenceyetthe genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy, and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.". Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. How do you protect this child? Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Heartbreaking, and still, something we must all notice and understand. M, Unique and ambitious, Vijayans project gains urgency and significance from our moment of resurgent nationalisms, when borders are being aggressively reasserted, in India and across the globe. G, An intervention like no other when it comes to thinking through not just the history of India but for reflections on borders, migration, the elusory nature of nations. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. 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. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. The interview has been paraphrased and condensed for clarity, at the interviewers discretion. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. I have two tests. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. She writes about war, conflict . 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Chopra is popular because she satisfies a certain need for validationthe trope of brown representation where the mere act of being represented is seen as a singular virtue worth applauding. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. It took a long time to get the voice right. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. 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? Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. 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. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. 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. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. I want to flag two essays where I engage with this in an in-depth manner, Disaster Ruins Everything, on my work in Haiti, and what it means to photograph disaster, especially when it is Brown and Black bodies. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. 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 have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry, The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif, Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar, These Are The 15 Women Who Helped Draft The Indian Constitution, Gender Roles And Stereotyping In To Kill A Mockingbird, A Brief Summary Of The Second Wave Of Feminism, A Brief Summary Of The First Wave Of Feminism, Kamala Das The Mother Of Modern Indian English Poetry | #IndianWomenInHistory, A Brief Summary Of The Third Wave Of Feminism, The Life And Times Of Dnyanjyoti Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule | #IndianWomenInHistory, FII Interviews: Charlotte Munch Bengtsen Talks About Women In Filmmaking, FII Interviews: Drag King And Influencer Mx. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. 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. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. 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. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Suchitra Vijayan undertook a 9000 mile journey over seven years to India's borderlands to write Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. Do you think the future is borderless? She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. 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. 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. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . When fencing began, he became trapped in a no-mans land, his marriage to a girl from Bangladesh ended with each being stranded on either side and he never got out of the cycle of debt and struggle, finally losing the ability to dream. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. This is not the violent right wing and their siege; its centrist and liberal media that is also relitigating history, deconstructing the core values of the constitution. As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. 2:16. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. The nation-state and its ruling class view borders as very different from the people who inhabit these liminal spaces or communities that have been affected by border making and policing practices. 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? So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. 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. 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. This book ate into so much of my life. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. 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. It took me 8 years to write the book. Why the Modi government lies. 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). 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. 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. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. By looking beyond maps to create a museum of forgotten stories, Vijayan has given voice to those who live on the fringes like Ali or Sari. 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. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. Sometimes they are no more, but your storytelling is so invigorating that the reader doesnt forget them. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". 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. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. 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. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. That changes how you write and photograph a place. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. ""The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the state." Antonio Gramsci" A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. 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. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. Its about what people like me should do. 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. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. O. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. 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. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath.