If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. A literary community. To make matters worse, between 2013 and 2019, editors of channels and publications have been sacked and replaced, primarily because of their criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. 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. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. How did writing this book affect you? Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. 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. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. 2:16. J.G.P. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? She was part of a music band at PSG. 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. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. It took me 8 years to write the book. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? 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. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. '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. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. If it does, I have failed. He drops and picks up his kids from school, pines for his old job and is concerned about the newly-formed government in Pakistanall the while trying to salvage his crumbling marriage. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. 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. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Suchitra Vijayan. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. Over the span of seven years, Suchitra Vijayan interviewed scores of individuals, jotted countless notes, snapped hundreds of photographs, and altogether made herself witness to the manifold absurdities (and atrocities) of who gets to say where one nation ends and another begins. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. No one can write a book alone. 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. Required fields are marked *. She lucidly explains the complicated history of the McMahon Line, how the India-China border is the result of a fabrication perpetuated by the British colonial administration. She is currently working on her first novel. I wanted to make sure that I was writing in a way that was honest and true to my initial reactions, and capture that without centering myself. We see that during the journey, in a number of places, people stood in lines to speak with you, to show their paperwork to youhow did you negotiate the weight ofthose expectations, which might not have been explicit, but were still very much present? In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. 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? Always. 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. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. I dont want to make this about me. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. Bigotry is also big business. [1] Career [ edit] A place to read, on the Internet. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. So I try to learn and listen, and again, as I say in this book, "It is not my goal to 'bear witness' or 'give voice to the voiceless'. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. Its not comparable and should not be compared. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. Suchitra Vijayan. 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. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. Part of this learning was also why photographer Asim Rafiqui and I created the free UN/DO Photography workshops to think about image-making in relationship to power. But it needs to do more for peace. 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 . This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. 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. 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. 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. 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. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? We need more writers from Indias Northeast, Kashmir, Indigenous, Dalit, and Muslim communities to tell stories that help complete the canvas of narratives about India. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? 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. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. How did you respond to that environment being in an extremely challenging position yourself? The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Can you write about loss without living? 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. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. I spoke with Suchitra by email in July about Midnights Borders, the power of literary nonfiction, new possibilities of Indian American literature, neoliberal politics, and the importance of supporting underrepresented stories. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. This article was published more than4 years ago. 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. 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. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. Vijayan is no stranger to stories of violence. I find that profoundly inspiring. 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. 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. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. 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). But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". 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. 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. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. She writes about war, conflict . There are also those who have previously been tacit, if not active, supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Indian state. The government, of course, denies this. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). We no longer ask if this will lead to a better society, if it will benefit the vast majority of those farthest away from power. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: Thank you! 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. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. 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. The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. By looking beyond maps to create a museum of forgotten stories, Vijayan has given voice to those who live on the fringes like Ali or Sari. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. suchitrav. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. You've mentioned in the text that you've spent your entire adult life thinking about state violence and justice because of a troubling incident in 1994 when your father was attacked. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. 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. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations 'The border making project is central to the capitalist and neoliberal logic,' Vijayan says. Your email address will not be published. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. 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. 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.
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