What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. 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. 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. Also, hope is a discipline. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. 'Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India' review: A 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. Q: Speaking about the content of the work, by including under-represented perspectives on the frequently debated partition and border laws you present a novel perspective to journalistic canon. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. This article was published more than4 years ago. 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. 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. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. 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. You can find them on, The #GBVinMedia Campaign: Media Reportage Of Gender-Based Violence, #IndianWomenInHistory: Remembering The Untold Legacies of Indian Women, How To Write About Abortion: A Rights-Based Approach, The Crowdsourced List Of Social Justice Collectives Across Indian Campuses. . Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) 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. 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. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. It has taken me over a decade to get here. 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. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. Can you write about loss without living? Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. Suchitra Vijayan > Faculty > People > NYU Gallatin Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. 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. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. Suchitra Vijayan | The Nation Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Suchitra Vijayan. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. She was part of a music band at PSG. We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! As the author notes, here, beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. A. Midnights Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? 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. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. The government, of course, denies this. Perhaps that offers some protection? Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Bigotry is also big business. How do you think this shapes climate justice? is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. Not mine. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. 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. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) Updated Date: The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade Copyright 2023. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. No one can write a book alone. 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. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. Vijayan: I wasnt trying to write a hybrid book; I was trying to tell the stories I encountered as a way to think about the moral and political realities of our lives. 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. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. 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. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. Suchitra - Wikipedia This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. 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. She has also been appreciated for her honest and positive-humour-filled judging at reality shows like Vijay TV's Airtel Super Singer, Sun TV's Sun Singer, Asianet's Music India, and Bol Baby Bol on Gemini TV and Surya TV. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. 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. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. 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. Suchitra Vijayan Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. 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. 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 shares borders with a host of . You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. 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. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. 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. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. 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. She lives in New York. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? While that incident had a profound impact on me, my politics, how I think about violence, its relationship to justice, or the lack of it, this is not the same kind of violence Kashmiris have been subjugated to. This affects who gets to document, and whom. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. 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 . Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. 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. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. And, in many cases, they are children of the literary, cultural, or political elite who have long been the beneficiaries of the Indian state. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki They dont. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? @suchitrav. A Seven Year, 9,000-Mile Journey Along India's Contested Land Borders But it needs to do more for peace. 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. Are you expecting any pushback at all? Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. Commentary Politics. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? Often, we settle comfortably into describing things as communal riots instead of saying that it was a state-abetted violence, a pogrom, or a brutal massacre. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJPs propaganda machine, Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates, Fox News bosses scolded reporters who challenged false election claims, To fight defamation suit, Fox News cites election conspiracy theories. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. 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. 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. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. They cannot be abusive or personal. 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. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. '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. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. She still does a radio show called Flight983 on Radio Mirchi, on Sunday evenings (79 pm). [6], She wrote a short story, a graphic illustration of an episode in the life of a black peppercorn called Kuru-Milaku, called "The Runaway Peppercorn".[7]. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. 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 first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan How do you protect this child? I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. 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. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. What do these events have in common? And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. 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. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Your email address will not be published. How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. 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. 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. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. 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. 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. So the first reflection is this idea of where we are right now: as people, as a society, as a community. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. 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). Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. Sometimes lost. I dont have apprehensions. I have two tests. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? 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. 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. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. 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? 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. 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. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". There is a lot to learn and unlearn, and a writer and a photographer should respond to a political moment, and the work should be a reflection of those practices. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. All rights reserved. Be it the teenager who is offered guns, money, and M&M candies to fight the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or Ali, who seeks solace in darkness as the floodlights installed on his plot of land along the India-Bangladesh border leaves him traumatized, or the nonagenarian Johinder Singh Suj from Sindh (a province in present-day Pakistan), who still cherishes his school geography textbook that shows a map of undivided British India the people are captured with deep empathy and come alive in her narration with the adept use of dialogue. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. 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. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Instagram photos and videos 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. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. 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.
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