These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. 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. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. Suchitra Vijayan. 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. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? A: This is a very loaded question. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. Why the Modi government lies. 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. In the popular depictions of India circulating in the US, we rarely see the stories that the nations jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. In her new book It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness 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. A place to read, on the Internet. 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. It has taken me over a decade to get here. They cannot be abusive or personal. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. But also, to be clear in terms of what I wanted to accomplish: as I say in the book, I wasnt bearing witness or giving voice to the voicelessthe people in this book are eloquent and political voices of their lives and realities. 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. 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. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. 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. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Already a subscriber? Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). 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? The government, of course, denies this. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. This is a challenging task for the writer. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. 10 books like The Home and the World (picked by 7,000+ authors) Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. I want to clarify that what I witnessed or the violence inflicted on my father is not the same as what over eight million Kashmiris have endured. The book was called ``a genre- bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.`` Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. 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. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? 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. Sometimes the news is the story. 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. Vijayan: Most Indian American writers, especially many of them who occupy the broad spectrum of literary to punditry, come from immense privilege of caste and class. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade We have migrated to a new commenting platform. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. India shares borders with a host of . The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Supreme Court forms expert panel to probe any regulatory failure on Adani issue, India makes renewed push for consensus at G20 Foreign Ministers meeting, Hindenburg Research report on Adani Group | Supreme Court verdict on expert committee on March 2, High debt on Vedanta books puts investors on tenterhooks, Employees Provident Fund: How to activate UAN online, 1947: Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act passed, RMA 0-1 FCB, El Clasico highlights: Barcelona leads on aggregate after beating Real Madrid courtesy of a Militao own goal. After being detained at one of the checkpoints for over two hours, I made my way to one of the villages closest to the Line of Control. What matters is that the book exists. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. 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? This book ate into so much of my life. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Perhaps thats their victory. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. More from this author , Tags: Aruni Kashyap, Asian American, bollywood, Brahmanism, caste system, democracy, Hindu, Hinduism, Hinduphobia, Hindutva, immigrants, immigration, India, Indian American, Indian American literature, Leni Riefenstahl, Midnight's Borders, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, model minority, Modi, Narendra Damodardas Modi, Narendra Modi, neoliberalism, photographs, photography, Polis Project, Politics, Priyanka Chopra, south asian, South Asian American, South Asian diaspora, Stan Swamy, Suchitra Vijayan, travel writing, Filed Under: Features & Reviews, Rumpus Original. There is something deeply flawed in the way we live today. She is not alone. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. It took a long time to get the voice right. No one can write a book alone. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. I find that profoundly inspiring. 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'. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. 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. 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. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. There are also those who have previously been tacit, if not active, supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Indian state. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. 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. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. This article was published more than4 years ago. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state Creative . Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. 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 Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. 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. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. 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. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. 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. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. J.G.P. 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. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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 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. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. Sari Begum, born of rape during the Partition and married off to a violent, alcoholic man twenty years older than her, is forced to part with her land to make space for an army bunker, while Natasha Javed stumbles upon a piece of family history that reveals her ancestor being killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 and the subsequent trauma and loss of having to be forcefully emptied of history when they crossed over to Pakistan, and how talking about this would make them traitors in their homeland. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence that India has committed in its borderlandsinjustice that has irrigated the glamour and prosperity we witness in what some of us in those borderlands call mainland India. Vijayan, a barrister by profession, is a founding director of Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization in New York. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Bigotry is also big business. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Sometimes they are no more, but your storytelling is so invigorating that the reader doesnt forget them. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. Zoya, a young female officer, is now confined to her wheelchair, and Milind, who also makes it out alive, is seen at home with drawn curtains, battling trauma. 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 I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. 582.1K views. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. They took my land, they stole my life, they stole my future, they took my nightmares and they stole my dreams too. Ali went missing in 2018. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. I have two tests. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . Her career as a playback singer now spans Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam films and she has several hits in all these languages to her credit. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "Excerpts from the #BBC documentary Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? They continue to. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. Your prose is hopeful there. 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. Suchitra Vijayan | The Nation Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. 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. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. 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. Your email address will not be published. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. Not mine. Updated Date: You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. 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. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Vijayan is no stranger to stories of violence. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. O. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. Part of this process is a need to turn the lens back at the powerful. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". SUCHITRA VIJAYAN PHOTOGRAPHY - 42 Photos - Manhatan, NY - Yelp 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? She is the executive director of the Polis Project . 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.. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. 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'. How do you protect this child? Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. 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. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences.