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Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. 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. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. 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. When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. suchitrav. 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. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. All rights reserved. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. A relatively small group of people runs it. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of. @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? Perhaps thats their victory. 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. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. So the first reflection is this idea of where we are right now: as people, as a society, as a community. Some things are just not discussed anymore. Are you expecting any pushback at all? Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Suchitra Vijayan. Barrister. 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. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. 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. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? 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. She is currently working on her first novel. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. It took me 8 years to write the book. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Often, we settle comfortably into describing things as communal riots instead of saying that it was a state-abetted violence, a pogrom, or a brutal massacre. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. 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. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. J.G.P. 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. 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. She writes about war, conflict . It has taken me over a decade to get here. They continue to. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. 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. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. 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. 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. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. I cant think in terms of the future being borderless, I can only think in terms of fracturing. There are already about 20 million climate refugees around South Asias borderlands. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . 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. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. How do you think this shapes climate justice? In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. Chopra is popular because she satisfies a certain need for validationthe trope of brown representation where the mere act of being represented is seen as a singular virtue worth applauding. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. In that process, her reportage unravels the cultural and political implicationsof our bordersonour 'collective conscience', as capricious as that might be, and on the lives of those sandwiched between two warring nations. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. 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.. 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. Its a practice. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. One of the reasons why this book was written was to step back: to say that this violence that you and I listen to and encounter is not new to say that this violence is not new. The complexities of the Naga peace process were apparent on a visit to remote villages of Tuensang district where many of the women remained silent with others admitting they had never encountered an outsider, except Indian soldiers. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. 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. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. Midnights Borders perhaps also critiques the widely read body of work available as Indian English Writing (IWE), a literary canon that has so far told the story of India but seldom demonstrated social responsibility by acknowledging the atrocities India has committed silently within its borders. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. As a spy working for TASC, Tiwari has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. Suchitra Vijayan: The Indian state has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether its the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland Now the international viewfor instance while the Gujarat riots of 2002 brought critical international media attention and criticism, and [current Prime Minister] Modi was banned from entering the US, India was able to effectively manage global public opinion. 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. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. 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. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. 2:16. How does one think of violence, how does one make sense of all this, how does one retain a sense ofnot exactly humanity, but ratherempathy for the other? 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. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Vijayan researches meticulously into official documents and conducts a series of interviews in an effort to uncover the murky truths behind the death of Hilal Ahmed Mir, a supposed militant killed by the military in an encounter in the disputed territory of Kashmir, or Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who was shot when trying to cross the barbed wire at the porous India-Bangladesh border. But it needs to do more for peace. More than two weeks after the attack, our analysis finds that no news site had rectified the errors in their reporting, leaving these misleading facts as a matter of public record. 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. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? 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. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. O. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. 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.". Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. 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. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. 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. Be it the teenager who is offered guns, money, and M&M candies to fight the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or Ali, who seeks solace in darkness as the floodlights installed on his plot of land along the India-Bangladesh border leaves him traumatized, or the nonagenarian Johinder Singh Suj from Sindh (a province in present-day Pakistan), who still cherishes his school geography textbook that shows a map of undivided British India the people are captured with deep empathy and come alive in her narration with the adept use of dialogue. 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. Suchitra was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. She is not alone. A: This is a very loaded question. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. That changes how you write and photograph a place. 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. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. 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. 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. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. My friend Ritesh Uttamchandani said this once, the lens that elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed is often impossible to bridge. 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. She lives in New York. They cannot be abusive or personal. Is that a probable solution? Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. 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. 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. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. 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. 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. 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. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. 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. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. 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. 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. As I say in the book, Kashmir changed me, it gave me political and moral clarity to always stand with those fighting for their peoples freedom and dignity. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. 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