This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. Some things are just not discussed anymore. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. They continue to. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. This book ate into so much of my life. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. This is a challenging task for the writer. ", "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.". Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. 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. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Copyright 2023. I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. 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. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. They cannot be abusive or personal. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. Perhaps that offers some protection? Thank you! 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. As a lawyer, journalist, and human rights activist who has worked in conflict-ridden territories of Kosovo, Egypt, Rwanda, and elsewhere, she has often met people scrambling for bare existence, caught in a no-mans land. A: This is a very loaded question. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. Suchitra Vijayan. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. 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. Again, in the India-China border, she finds a young army officer closely referring to a book that contradicts the official version of the Indo-China war of 1962, and concludes that perhaps, he recognizes that most of soldiering involved cynical subordination to ideas that no longer made sense.. 2:16. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Your email address will not be published. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. Required fields are marked *. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. 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. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. 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. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. 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. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? When fencing began, he became trapped in a no-mans land, his marriage to a girl from Bangladesh ended with each being stranded on either side and he never got out of the cycle of debt and struggle, finally losing the ability to dream. 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. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Is that a probable solution? Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. How do you protect this child? Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. 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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. Second, there were times when I ran out of money, when some said that such a book would not be published, when some declared that such a book could not be written. Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. O. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Its easy for Indian Americans and diaspora Desis to become tokens who speak of diversity but not equity or representation, talk of caste as culture and whitewash Hindutva. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. 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. This is a serious, often funny and deeply revealing book. M, An essential, beautifully written report from the hellish margins of a modern mega-state struggling to be a nation, of people whose lives continue to be shaped by violent political marches across age-old homes and habitats. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. No one can write a book alone. Suchitra Vijayan traveled Indias vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just a few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries.. You need a community of people to support you. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Suchitra Vijayan. There is something deeply flawed in the way we live today. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. Its not comparable and should not be compared. 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. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. 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? This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. First, does my work aid the powerful? If it does, I have failed. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Why the Modi government lies. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. 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. L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. 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. 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. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . Barrister. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. 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. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. 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. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. 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. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. 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. On the C-SPAN Networks: Suchitra Vijayan is a Founder and Executive Director for the Project Polis, The with one video in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a . In her15,000-kilometre journey, spread over seven years, Vijayan mulls over the meaning of freedom, belongingness in a land of imagined communities, created by territorial demarcations. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. '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. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. 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. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. 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. They dont. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. 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. Vijayans lens not only captures the people but also the past through objects, such as the picture of Kotwali Gate, the remains of a medieval fort that serves as a border checkpoint rife with weeds and trees growing on it, symbolic of a state bent on rewriting history rather than preserving it. Your prose is hopeful there. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. 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. 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. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. She is currently working on her first novel. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. It is also the site of the worlds biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its peopleespecially those living in disputed border regions. 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 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. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. Already a subscriber? Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. 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. 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. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. 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. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. How did writing this book affect you? Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Three hundred million people who had been considered less than subjects under the British rule, divided for years by religion, language, class, and caste, would all be united under one book: the revolutionary Constitution given to India by Babasaheb Ambedkar. How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? I was reading a lot of Pessoa when I was in Afghanistan, so another placeholder title was 'Maps/Lines/Cartographies of Disquiet', inspired by the Book of Disquiet. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) I have two tests. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. 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. 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. 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. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. 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. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. It took a long time to get the voice right. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. How violence against women and girlsand even how sexual violence against men and boys (something we dont even talk about enough) is depictedis all seriously problematic.
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