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. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Suchitra Vijayan's debut book, Midnight's Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.The book recounts the author's recent journey across India's land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. 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. I still do. 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. As she travelled 9000 miles over seven years across Indias borders, some drawn so hastily that they cut across fields, homes and courtyards, she met men, women and children, finishing with endless notebooks, over a thousand images and more than 300 hours of recorded conversations. Her quest took her to the farthest ends of the India-Bangladesh/ China/ Myanmar/ Pakistan borders. 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. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. The complexities of the Naga peace process were apparent on a visit to remote villages of Tuensang district where many of the women remained silent with others admitting they had never encountered an outsider, except Indian soldiers. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. She writes about war, conflict . The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. No one can write a book alone. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. 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. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? 'Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India' review: A The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. She sang her first song for the movie, Lesa Lesa under the composition of Harris Jayaraj and her co-singer was the legendary, K. S. Chitra. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. Sign in. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. In another essay from 2019, I write about the banality of bearing witness as an excuse to produce extractive work. These questions about documentation practices started long before I started this book project, and I learnt along the way. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. 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 find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. In her new book India shares borders with a host of . The emotional cost is something else altogether. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. Suchitra Vijayan 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. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. Beyond the confusion over the death tolls at Balakot, news organizations variously reported that between 25 and 350 kilograms of the explosive RDX was used in the attack, when no such information was officially released. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? 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. The mask is off. The arrest of Khurram Parvez shows that India is no Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. 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? Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Instagram photos and videos Can you write about loss without living? Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation The show deals with interesting international happenings. 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. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. A: This is a very loaded question. They continue to. 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. Thank you! They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. How do you think this shapes climate justice? Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Suchitra Vijayan | C-SPAN.org I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. . Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. Your email address will not be published. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. 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. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. 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. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. 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 . 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. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliots, Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves, RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris, The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. 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. Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. 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. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. Suchitra Vijayan | The Nation Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Global Ethics Review: Midnight's Borders, with Suchitra Vijayan NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? 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. Required fields are marked *. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics.

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