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). Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. Your email address will not be published. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. 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. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. Suchitra Vijayan. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. 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. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. 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. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. by Suchitra Vijayan Hardcover 1,759.00 2,023.00 You Save: 264.00 (13%) Usually dispatched in 1 to 3 weeks. So now, how do we respond to this? But who gets to speak for so many of us? She is the executive director of the Polis Project . 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. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. 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. The nation-state and its ruling class view borders as very different from the people who inhabit these liminal spaces or communities that have been affected by border making and policing practices. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) How do you think this shapes climate justice? Sometimes lost. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. Over the span of seven years, Suchitra Vijayan interviewed scores of individuals, jotted countless notes, snapped hundreds of photographs, and altogether made herself witness to the manifold absurdities (and atrocities) of who gets to say where one nation ends and another begins. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. Not everyone lived to see its promises. Bhawan Singh, who photographed the Nellie massacre, said he had never seen anything like it. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. 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. 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. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. 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. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. A relatively small group of people runs it. Suchitra Vijayan. 4 reviews of Suchitra Vijayan Photography "Huge fan of Suchitra Vijayan Photography! Now, along with the medias legitimization of an ideology that promotes violence including riots and lynchings its performance after Pulwama leaves severe doubts as to whether it is engaged in journalism or the propagation of Hindu majoritarianism. And this is always at the expense of others. How did writing this book affect you? To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. 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. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. 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. A literary community. The argument put forward was simple: India, like most countries, had its human rights violations, but these were characterized as the growing pains and maturation of the worlds largest democracy. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. 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. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? Updated Date: She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. Author, lawyer and journalist, Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Cerebration editor Smita Maitra on her book Midnight's Borders, maps, fragmented identities and postcolonial nation-states. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? So we might never know the true extent of this loss. 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. 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. These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. I find that profoundly inspiring. 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. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. 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. How violence against women and girlsand even how sexual violence against men and boys (something we dont even talk about enough) is depictedis all seriously problematic. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. A: Writers are very strange creatures. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. What matters is that the book exists. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? 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. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Why the Modi government lies. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. This affects who gets to document, and whom. 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. 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. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. They continue to. 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. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. 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. Also, hope is a discipline. 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. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. 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. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. @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. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class.
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