Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. 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? It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. 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. I had a very stable home to come back to. 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. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. That changes how you write and photograph a place. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. 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. She was part of a music band at PSG. Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. 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 . We perform rituals of freedom in a right-less societywe dont ask if the rules, laws, and policies that are put in place are fair, just, right or equitable. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. The book is a prelude to what was coming, and is also a impassioned plea to my readers to ask some fundamental questions of what it means to live in a country like Indiawhat is the function of a state when its primary preoccupation is no longer the citizen but a performance of an ideology? She was part of a music band at PSG. Suchitra Vijayan's new book, Midnight's Borders: A People's 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. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. 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. . 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. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. How do you think this shapes climate justice? But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. I have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. 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. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? So we might never know the true extent of this loss. 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.. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. What do these events have in common? 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. 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. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. 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. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. She still does a radio show called Flight983 on Radio Mirchi, on Sunday evenings (79 pm). How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. Barkha Dutt: India has made its point in Pakistan. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. 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. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. Q: You had to deal with a lot of ethical considerations as a writer and photographer, which echo throughout your and your fellow journalists work, as evaluated in your book. 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. 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. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? As the author notes, here, beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. A. Midnights Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building. 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. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. 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. The images, however, are not all bereft of hope, as children from both India and Bangladesh use a border pillar as a cricket stump, while men on opposing sides of the war on terror in Afghanistan gather around in a cold evening, smoking and sharing stories. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). 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'. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. 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. We play an ever more important role in these times when there is a fascist authoritarian regime in India and a deeply racist police state in the US. 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. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? I still do. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. 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. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. A place to read, on the Internet. 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. I find that profoundly inspiring. Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. Creative . Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. ", "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.". 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. 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. During the initial search, the BSF troops recovered a black coloured drone - DJI Matrice (made in China), in partially damaged condition, lying near Dhussi Bundh near Shahjada village. 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 is no stranger to stories of violence. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. 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. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. 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. 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. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. 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. And this is always at the expense of others. 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. 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. I dont have apprehensions. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. 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.". Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. [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]. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Second, there were times when I ran out of money, when some said that such a book would not be published, when some declared that such a book could not be written. Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. @suchitrav. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. 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.