When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. The book was called ``a genre- bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.`` Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. 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. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. Like most women, I learnt to navigate this toxic misogyny, the threat of sexual violence, and patriarchy by merely existing as a dark-skinned woman in this country. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. But for me hope is radical; hope is the last bastion of our defense. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. ", "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.". Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. She is currently working on her first novel. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. In her new book The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. 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. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. 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. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. 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. 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. You need a community of people to support you. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. 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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. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. This is a challenging task for the writer. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. 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. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. Copyright 2023. How did writing this book affect you? Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. 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. 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.. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. 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. 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. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. Stallings, Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? 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. Sometimes the news is the story. The show deals with interesting international happenings. At a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayans Midnights Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of Indias nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. 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. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. 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'. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. I still do. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. 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. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal 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. Updated Date: The interview has been paraphrased and condensed for clarity, at the interviewers discretion. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. We need more such books. The government, of course, denies this. 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. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. 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. 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. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. 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. They dont. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. Bigotry is also big business. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. This book ate into so much of my life. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. 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. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. He writes TPS reports for an overbearing boss who calls him the minimum guy. He has replaced eating vada pav at ungodly hours on the streets with overpriced salads. Suchitra Vijayan. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. No one can write a book alone. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. 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. 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 . Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. It offers brief historical notes on how the nations current borders came into force alongside accounts of increasing militarisation, disputes, little massacres and forgotten pogroms, no-mans-lands, and the people through whom the border runs like barbed wire. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? 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. In her15,000-kilometre journey, spread over seven years, Vijayan mulls over the meaning of freedom, belongingness in a land of imagined communities, created by territorial demarcations. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. 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. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. 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. 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. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' I have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. She is not alone. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". Always. Where does that leave us? The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? We once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. 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. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. At the end of it, I felt that I learnt more about myself, more about my home, I had becomeif not a better writer, an infinitely better human being, which is to say that one realises that theres always a Longue dure that one needs to consider, crave out time and space to think, train oneself not to always react. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". 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. 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. Creative . I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. Perhaps that offers some protection? 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 . This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). 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. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. Its a vicious cycle. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). We have migrated to a new commenting platform. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and is the author of The House With a Thousand Stories, His Fathers Disease, and There Is No Good Time for Bad News. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India.