I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. Suchitra Vijayan. 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. 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. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Suchitra Vijayan. Suchitra Vijayan's debut book, Midnight's Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.The book recounts the author's recent journey across India's land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years. Stallings, Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things. 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. The controversy surrounding the Rafale deal and allegations of corruption against the government were suddenly sidelined, as was the order for the eviction of more than a million forest dwellers (that was later stayed) and a hearing on the repeal of an important constitutional clause before the Supreme Court. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. So now, how do we respond to this? As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. I had a very stable home to come back to. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. 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. If it does, I have failed. 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. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . 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. Its a practice. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. 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. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliots, Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves, RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris, The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. What do you think the future holds? Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. '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. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Sign in. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. 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. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Categories. But the number of anonymous sources willing to disclose classified and conflicting information to reporters who cited them without corroboration points to a serious crisis in how information is reported to the public. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Is that a probable solution? I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. 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. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? 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. I still do. Commentary Politics. 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. Atmany points in Midnight's Borders, we see several men in positions of power view the women, who cross over from the 'other' side, as violable. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. 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. Perhaps that offers some protection? Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. 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. 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. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. [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]. 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. @suchitrav. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. 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. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. 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.. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. 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. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" We cant continue to see this in neo-liberal terms like stakeholder. I think the usage of this kind of language is ineffectual; its emptied of imagination. 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. Christopher Clary: India and Pakistan resort to the diplomacy of violence and flirt with catastrophe, Hafsa Kanjwal: As India beats its war drums over Pulwama, its occupation of Kashmir is being ignored. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. 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. 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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. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. She has a sister named, Sunitha. She has a sister named, Sunitha. What matters is that the book exists. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST 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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. The emotional cost is something else altogether. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. 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. This is a challenging task for the writer. In her new book When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. Instead, the Indian media has ascribed to itself the role of an amplifier of the government propaganda that took two nuclear states to the brink of war. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. 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. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. 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. 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. It has taken me over a decade to get here. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Creative . More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) 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. 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. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. She was part of a music band at PSG. Subscribe here. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. That was my starting point. 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. They continue to. Your prose is hopeful there. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. 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. I want to flag two essays where I engage with this in an in-depth manner, Disaster Ruins Everything, on my work in Haiti, and what it means to photograph disaster, especially when it is Brown and Black bodies. 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. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. Not mine. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. India shares borders with a host of . How did you respond to that environment being in an extremely challenging position yourself? Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Perhaps thats their victory. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. 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. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. 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. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. Tamil Movie Articles Trisha | Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya | Tamannah | Anniyan | Aishwarya Rai", "Bigg Boss Awards for each contestant in Bigg Boss Tamil 4", Suchitra: I can sound sweet, sexy, bold or sensual, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suchitra&oldid=1141096550, Crossover episode with Bigg Boss Tamil; Fearless Award, Nominated: Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer Telugu for the song 'Nijamena' from, Nominated: SIIMA Award for Best Female Playback Singer|Best Female Playback Singer for the song 'Sir Osthara' from, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 09:35. The book was called ``a genre- bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.`` Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? 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. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. . This income helps us keep the magazine alive. Always. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? Feminism In India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist media organisation to learn, educate and develop a feminist sensibility among the youth. Required fields are marked *. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. But who gets to speak for so many of us? Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. 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. 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. 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?