A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. 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. How do you think this shapes climate justice? Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. My role, then, and this books role, is to find in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty.". In Suchitra Vijayan's new book, borders are as arbitrary as history Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. What do these events have in common? She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. 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. 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). Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. Categories. The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. She writes about war, conflict . Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. ", "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.". In this podcast, Vijayan discusses with host Alex Woodson her 9,000-mile journey through India's borderlands, which formed the basis of the book, and she discusses the violent and continuing history of the 1947 partition, the stark differences and similarities along South Asia's various borders, and what "citizenship" mean in India in 2021 and Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Are you expecting any pushback at all? The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). 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.. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. 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. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. 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. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. You become responsible for a human being. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? 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. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. 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. Suchitra was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. The border runs through him, his friend Jamshed had told Vijayan, He is almost gone, but I dont want his story to be gone too.. 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. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. 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. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. 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. '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. Creative . Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki Your prose is hopeful there. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. 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. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. Not mine. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. FII Media Private Limited | All rights reserved, "Imagine how it would be for someone coming from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, working class background, who wants to come into thisit is especially difficult if youre a woman coming from these backgrounds. 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. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. 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. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. 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. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. How did writing this book affect you? Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. So now, how do we respond to this? When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. Suchitra Vijayan | The Caravan A: Writers are very strange creatures. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? 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. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. 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. She is not alone. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. Suchitra Vijayan | C-SPAN.org @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. Midnights Borders , Suchitra Vijayan includes a photo of the pillar, which becomes a cricket stump for boys on either side of the border most days. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. 2:16. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? 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. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. Subscribe here. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them.
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