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? These instances are also about border practices because modern states, especially liberal democracies, expend immense energy in creating and maintaining identity categories: who belongs, and where. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. I want to clarify that what I witnessed or the violence inflicted on my father is not the same as what over eight million Kashmiris have endured. 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. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. 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. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. A: Writers are very strange creatures. 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 . Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. To make matters worse, between 2013 and 2019, editors of channels and publications have been sacked and replaced, primarily because of their criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. 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. [1] Career [ edit] 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. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. 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. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. 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. 4 reviews of Suchitra Vijayan Photography "Huge fan of Suchitra Vijayan Photography! There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. 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. 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. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. 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. Your prose is hopeful there. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles was grievously underreported. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. Those notes were raw and immediate. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. Can you write about loss without living? 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. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. In her new book We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. 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.. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. First, does my work aid the powerful? The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade She has a sister named, Sunitha. She lives in New York. It took me 8 years to write the book. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. 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. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. What is the function of seeing and documenting? Its been a little over a week since the book came out, and every day this week, I have woken up to emails, messages, and DMs from readers. A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe set foot in India for the first time in July, 1947 to draw the borders and completed the task within seven weeks, engendering communal riots, a heavily militarized border, four wars and seven decades of violence and hatred between the two countries. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? 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. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? 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. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. 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. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. 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. Travel to States like Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in the Northeast which share borders with China and Myanmar required Inner Line Permits, BSF soldiers followed her everywhere on the West Bengal/ Bangladesh border, and in Kashmir she was summoned to meet the local inspector at Uri. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. 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. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. Suchitra Vijayan. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. Do you think the future is borderless? Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: