A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Creative . Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Vijayan: I wasnt trying to write a hybrid book; I was trying to tell the stories I encountered as a way to think about the moral and political realities of our lives. Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. 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. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: 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. I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. 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 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. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Sometimes lost. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for humanising terrorists. 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. Barrister. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. What matters is that the book exists. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. I have two tests. What do you think the future holds? [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. Suchitra Vijayan (Author of Midnight's Borders) - Goodreads Categories. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations 'The border making project is central to the capitalist and neoliberal logic,' Vijayan says. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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? Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. 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. 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. But who gets to speak for so many of us? I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Ananya is a chaotic humanities student with a deep interest in the relationship between art and society, a writing obsession, and way too many bizarre ideas involving their camera. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. 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. You need a community of people to support you. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. The revolutionary Constitution not only created a social world made of contradictions, but it very soon became the tool of suppressing dissent, deployed laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and Public Safety Act (PSA) in Kashmir. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. Thank you! Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation The Indian media must learn to portray the conflict and human rights violations in the region in a more nuanced way, and not reduce Kashmir to a catalogue of death, destruction and emergency laws. 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. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: ""Fighting for justice and human rights in It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. Her writing and award-winning photography culminated in Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, which was recently shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF book prize. 582.1K views. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. Suchitra Vijayan - New Lines Institute Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. If it does, I have failed. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. Where does that leave us? Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Instagram photos and videos Find him on Twitter at @AruniKashyap. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. 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? Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "Excerpts from the #BBC documentary Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. 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. 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. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. She is not alone. 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. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. A Seven Year, 9,000-Mile Journey Along India's Contested Land Borders The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Supreme Court forms expert panel to probe any regulatory failure on Adani issue, India makes renewed push for consensus at G20 Foreign Ministers meeting, Hindenburg Research report on Adani Group | Supreme Court verdict on expert committee on March 2, High debt on Vedanta books puts investors on tenterhooks, Employees Provident Fund: How to activate UAN online, 1947: Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act passed, RMA 0-1 FCB, El Clasico highlights: Barcelona leads on aggregate after beating Real Madrid courtesy of a Militao own goal. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. Updated Date: 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. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, 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. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. 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. This book ate into so much of my life. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. Suchitra Vijayan's debut book, Midnight's Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.The book recounts the author's recent journey across India's land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years. 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. I dont want to make this about me. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. 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. She is currently working on her first novel. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. [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]. 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. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" Bhawan Singh, who photographed the Nellie massacre, said he had never seen anything like it. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Opinion | After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJP's You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. 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. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? 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. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. Its a practice. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. Part of this learning was also why photographer Asim Rafiqui and I created the free UN/DO Photography workshops to think about image-making in relationship to power. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. No one can write a book alone. 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 act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. 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. 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. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. 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. Suchitra Vijayan traveled Indias vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just a few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries.. Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. 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? Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. ", "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.". Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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'. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . You become responsible for a human being. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. by Suchitra Vijayan Hardcover 1,759.00 2,023.00 You Save: 264.00 (13%) Usually dispatched in 1 to 3 weeks. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. Required fields are marked *. But for me hope is radical; hope is the last bastion of our defense. 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. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth.
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