Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. Are you expecting any pushback at all? 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. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. Its a vicious cycle. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. A: Writers are very strange creatures. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. 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. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. In Midnight's Borders, barrister, political analyst, and writer Suchitra Vijayan documentsmany such telling accounts of lives both growing and barely getting by alongIndian borderlands. 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. Why the Modi government lies. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. 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. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" 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. 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Copyright 2023. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. In Nellie (Assam) too, where over 3,000 Muslims were killed in 1983, people stared at Vijayan in confusion, no one comes here anymore, she was told. The emotional cost is something else altogether. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. 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. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. Q: Speaking about the content of the work, by including under-represented perspectives on the frequently debated partition and border laws you present a novel perspective to journalistic canon. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. Rumpus: I believe your book contributes to an important conversation about India we must have right now in the United States, for its own sake. In the popular depictions of India circulating in the US, we rarely see the stories that the nations jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet. 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. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. 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. Heartbreaking, and still, something we must all notice and understand. M, Unique and ambitious, Vijayans project gains urgency and significance from our moment of resurgent nationalisms, when borders are being aggressively reasserted, in India and across the globe. G, An intervention like no other when it comes to thinking through not just the history of India but for reflections on borders, migration, the elusory nature of nations. 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. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. 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. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. 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? Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. 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. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. As Sari Begum's story [in the book] illustrates, 'A life where the violence of the border is not at the fence, or in the trenches, but at the center of 'their' and our 'universe'. 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. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. 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. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) But its also important to constantly take account of who is writing about this India to an Indian and global audience. 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. Thank you! Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. A t a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayan's Midnight's Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of India's nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. It took me 8 years to write the book. The events in Hathras did not happen at the border; neither did the murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. They took my land, they stole my life, they stole my future, they took my nightmares and they stole my dreams too. Ali went missing in 2018. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. She lives in New York. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. You will see very little critical commentary or public positions on Hindutva, its corrosive role in India, or how RSS works here in the USfunding and now interfering in US elections. As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. 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'. Suchitra Vijayan. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. They continue to. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. 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). While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? 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 . A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. A Barrister by training, 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 . We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Already a subscriber? The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. But who gets to speak for so many of us? You need a community of people to support you. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. How do you protect this child? Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. 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. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. 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. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. 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. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. 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. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. Not mine. This is a challenging task for the writer. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles was grievously underreported. 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. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. 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. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. How did writing this book affect you? 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. [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. 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. Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry, The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif, Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar, These Are The 15 Women Who Helped Draft The Indian Constitution, Gender Roles And Stereotyping In To Kill A Mockingbird, A Brief Summary Of The Second Wave Of Feminism, A Brief Summary Of The First Wave Of Feminism, Kamala Das The Mother Of Modern Indian English Poetry | #IndianWomenInHistory, A Brief Summary Of The Third Wave Of Feminism, The Life And Times Of Dnyanjyoti Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule | #IndianWomenInHistory, FII Interviews: Charlotte Munch Bengtsen Talks About Women In Filmmaking, FII Interviews: Drag King And Influencer Mx. After being detained at one of the checkpoints for over two hours, I made my way to one of the villages closest to the Line of Control. 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. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Suchitra was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence that India has committed in its borderlandsinjustice that has irrigated the glamour and prosperity we witness in what some of us in those borderlands call mainland India. Vijayan, a barrister by profession, is a founding director of Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization in New York. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. India and its Borderlands: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Sharjeel Usmani, Book talk with Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnights Borders, Crisis at the Border: Contestation, Sovereignty, and Statelessness. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. But it needs to do more for peace. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. I have two tests. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. What matters is that the book exists. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. After her Twitter page was hacked in 2016, and the pictures and videos released by the hacker went viral under #suchileaks, following a spate of bad press owing to the fact that she only released a statement on Sun News saying she was focused on shutting the page down, Suchitra left for London to pursue culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. 582.1K views. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. 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 had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. 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. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Vijayan: As we have this conversation, Dr. Stan Swamy, the eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest, Indias oldest political prisoner, was murdered by the Indian state with the complicity of the judiciary. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. 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. 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. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. 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 . We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? Many news channels are not only owned, operated or invested in by politically influential families, but also are sometimes run for the express purpose of advancing party positions. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. Always. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances.