It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. 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. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. 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 . You become responsible for a human being. 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. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. ", "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.". Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. Suchitra Vijayan (Author of Midnight's Borders) - Goodreads If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Not mine. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. But who gets to speak for so many of us? 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. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. 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. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? suchitrav. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. 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. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. Suchitra - Wikipedia Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. Francesca Recchia, a researcher and writer and former director of the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, is the editor and creative director of The Polis Project.. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister, researcher and the author of "Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India." She is the executive director of the Polis Project. Its a vicious cycle. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Some things are just not discussed anymore. A Seven Year, 9,000-Mile Journey Along India's Contested Land Borders 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. 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. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. 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. 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. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" Where does that leave us? Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. Your prose is hopeful there. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". Why the Modi government lies. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. I have no control over what comes next. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . 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. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. 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. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. '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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. What matters is that the book exists. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. Also, hope is a discipline. 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. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. 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. 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. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. Always. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. 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. Perhaps thats their victory. Those notes were raw and immediate. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. 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. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Part of this process is a need to turn the lens back at the powerful. Is photographing a woman, who was gang-raped by the Sudanese army and put on the cover of TIMEpractically naked, able to stop the war? 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. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. 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. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. 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. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. 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. 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. Some of the oldest resistances in our nation are those communities who have been fighting for their own homes from militarisation who seek to exploit their mineral rich home land for mining. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Its about what people like me should do. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Its not comparable and should not be compared. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. 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. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. Suchitra Vijayan - Amazon In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. This is a challenging task for the writer. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? The Indian State and the people of this Republic. Suchitra Acharjee - Graduate Assistant - The University of Texas Rio [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]. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. That was my starting point. 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. I find that profoundly inspiring. 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. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. This affects who gets to document, and whom. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. Suchitra Vijayan complicates and expands our understanding of the South Asian American experience, urging readers to consider stories that cast dark eyes at India, a strategic ally of many Western nations. She is not alone. How did you arrive at this stylistic juncture where you manage to tell the stories of these people who are radically less privileged than you without appropriating them? This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Already a subscriber? 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. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. 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. Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. ""The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the state." Antonio Gramsci" A: Writers are very strange creatures. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation 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. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. 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. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. 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. The argument put forward was simple: India, like most countries, had its human rights violations, but these were characterized as the growing pains and maturation of the worlds largest democracy. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. 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. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. 10 books like The Home and the World (picked by 7,000+ authors) 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. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. Required fields are marked *. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? 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. They cannot be abusive or personal. 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 Vijayan's Midnight's Borders | Youth Ki Awaaz The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? 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. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. 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. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. But it needs to do more for peace. I dont want to make this about me. In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . We need more such books. 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. I had a very stable home to come back to. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' 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. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. No one can write a book alone. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. Updated Date: When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. 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. Respond to our political present. How did writing this book affect you? She is currently working on her first novel. The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. A place to read, on the Internet. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. 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. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. Sign in. Beyond the confusion over the death tolls at Balakot, news organizations variously reported that between 25 and 350 kilograms of the explosive RDX was used in the attack, when no such information was officially released. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia In this era when Indian armed forces and the police act with absolute impunity, a handful of local news outlets play an essential role in reporting and. In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and . From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. 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. 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'. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" Contributions for the charitable purposes ofThe Rumpus must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. 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. In the first season, when he and his team are tasked to thwart the terrorist attack Operation Zulfiqar, the plot moves from Mumbai to Kashmir.