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. 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. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. So here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power. What matters is that the book exists. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Subscribe here. As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. And, in many cases, they are children of the literary, cultural, or political elite who have long been the beneficiaries of the Indian state. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. For instance, if you went to school with, say, Indias most powerful publisher, or your dad plays golf or socialised at the Gymkhana with the politically powerful and the culturally influential, then that system is built to get you the resources. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. The people whose lives are not just materials for the book, who are, in some ways, your co-conspirators in trying to make sense of the social reality. This is the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". 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 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. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. These instances are also about border practices because modern states, especially liberal democracies, expend immense energy in creating and maintaining identity categories: who belongs, and where. 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. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) For instance, a border security personnel tells her how he failed to capture a photograph of a porcupine after spending half an hour trying to fit a helmet on its head, because he is bored and lonely. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. 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. 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. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. Updated Date: I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. The government, of course, denies this. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. 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. 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 None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. India and its Borderlands: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Sharjeel Usmani, Book talk with Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnights Borders, Crisis at the Border: Contestation, Sovereignty, and Statelessness. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. I had a very stable home to come back to. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Q: You had to deal with a lot of ethical considerations as a writer and photographer, which echo throughout your and your fellow journalists work, as evaluated in your book. In this podcast, Vijayan discusses with host Alex Woodson her 9,000-mile journey through India's borderlands, which formed the basis of the book, and she discusses the violent and continuing history of the 1947 partition, the stark differences and similarities along South Asia's various borders, and what "citizenship" mean in India in 2021 and Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. So now, how do we respond to this? Sign in. 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. This affects who gets to document, and whom. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? I have two tests. 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. 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. 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. by Suchitra Vijayan Hardcover 1,759.00 2,023.00 You Save: 264.00 (13%) Usually dispatched in 1 to 3 weeks. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. 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. How did writing this book affect you? Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. 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. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. 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. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. In the first season, when he and his team are tasked to thwart the terrorist attack Operation Zulfiqar, the plot moves from Mumbai to Kashmir. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. 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. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. They all have very specific and carefully curated origin/immigrant stories that cleverly exploit the model minority trope. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. A Barrister by training, 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 . ). Perhaps thats their victory. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. Her writing and award-winning photography culminated in Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, which was recently shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF book prize. 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. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. 'Music I Like', an album of Suchitra's renditions of Mahakavi Bharatiyaar's poetry, set to contemporary tunes and music, released by Universal Music, was a turning point in her career. 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. First, does my work aid the powerful? I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. 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. I have no control over what comes next. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. Author, lawyer and journalist, Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Cerebration editor Smita Maitra on her book Midnight's Borders, maps, fragmented identities and postcolonial nation-states. 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. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. As I say in the book, Kashmir changed me, it gave me political and moral clarity to always stand with those fighting for their peoples freedom and dignity. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. 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. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. 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. She is currently working on her first novel. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. 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 . Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. 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. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. Copyright 2023. 2:16. 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. 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. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Sometimes lost. A t a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayan's Midnight's Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of India's nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. 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. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. Its a vicious cycle. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. ", "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.". Sometimes the news is the story. I still do. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. 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. 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. How did you arrive at this stylistic juncture where you manage to tell the stories of these people who are radically less privileged than you without appropriating them? Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. But its also important to constantly take account of who is writing about this India to an Indian and global audience. This is a challenging task for the writer. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. 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. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. 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. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people.
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