This is a tightrope that you walk so well. The show deals with interesting international happenings. 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 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. How do you think this shapes climate justice? Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. How did you respond to that environment being in an extremely challenging position yourself? 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. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. 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 . There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. You will see very little critical commentary or public positions on Hindutva, its corrosive role in India, or how RSS works here in the USfunding and now interfering in US elections. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Do you think the future is borderless? If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. We see that during the journey, in a number of places, people stood in lines to speak with you, to show their paperwork to youhow did you negotiate the weight ofthose expectations, which might not have been explicit, but were still very much present? She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. 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. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. She lives in New York. The taxi driver who describes the Egyptian revolution in five minutes to an American columnist (who speaks no Arabic) is sadly where the genre is today. But also, to be clear in terms of what I wanted to accomplish: as I say in the book, I wasnt bearing witness or giving voice to the voicelessthe people in this book are eloquent and political voices of their lives and realities. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. How do you protect this child? 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. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. Some things are just not discussed anymore. 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. First, does my work aid the powerful? Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. What matters is that the book exists. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. 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. 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. Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". 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. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. 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. 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. Not everyone lived to see its promises. 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. 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. 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. Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. The Indian government bears some responsibility for this: Amid this brinkmanship between the two nuclear powers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. 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. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. As a graduate student at Yale, she researched and documented stories along the Af-Pak border and was embedded with the US forces in Afghanistan. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? They cannot be abusive or personal. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. 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. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. They dont. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. You become responsible for a human being. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. She has a sister named, Sunitha. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. 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. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. 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. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. Then you sit in a room with a mother telling you that she has no idea what happened to her son and has no way of knowing if hes ever coming back. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. 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. What is the function of seeing and documenting? Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. 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. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. 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. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. 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'. A literary community. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Sometimes lost. These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. That was my starting point. I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. I have two tests. Also, hope is a discipline. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. 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. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. Respond to our political present. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. Bigotry is also big business. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir Vijayan researches meticulously into official documents and conducts a series of interviews in an effort to uncover the murky truths behind the death of Hilal Ahmed Mir, a supposed militant killed by the military in an encounter in the disputed territory of Kashmir, or Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who was shot when trying to cross the barbed wire at the porous India-Bangladesh border. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. After her Twitter page was hacked in 2016, and the pictures and videos released by the hacker went viral under #suchileaks, following a spate of bad press owing to the fact that she only released a statement on Sun News saying she was focused on shutting the page down, Suchitra left for London to pursue culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu. 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. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. So here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? Suchitra Vijayan. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. You need a community of people to support you. A: This is a very loaded question. Founder & ExecDirector: @project_polis @watchthestate ; Teach @nyugallatin Writer Manhattan, NY linktr.ee/suchitravijayan Born April 14 Joined May 2008 8,013 Following 80.8K Followers Tweets & replies But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. I want to flag two essays where I engage with this in an in-depth manner, Disaster Ruins Everything, on my work in Haiti, and what it means to photograph disaster, especially when it is Brown and Black bodies. So the first reflection is this idea of where we are right now: as people, as a society, as a community. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. 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. 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. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. 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. 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. The government, of course, denies this. Some of the oldest resistances in our nation are those communities who have been fighting for their own homes from militarisation who seek to exploit their mineral rich home land for mining. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. With sharp political analyses, dense historical research and lyrical, image-rich prose, Vijayans journalism displays an inspiring ethic, one that is invested in the micro-histories of the small man, the one existing on the fringes of history and the one that most requires urgent representation. B, A book that will enlighten every citizen of every nation. As an attorney, 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 Iraqi refugees. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. Suchitra Vijayan undertook a 9000 mile journey over seven years to India's borderlands to write Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. ", "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.". 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. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. It is also the site of the worlds biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its peopleespecially those living in disputed border regions. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. 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. 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. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. 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. Subscribe here. NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. 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. While Border Pillar No 1 becomes a convenient stump for children playing cricket along the land that India shares with Bangladesh, roughly 2000 kilometers away in Punjab a woman farmer watches on as the army builds a bunker on the few acres of land she owns. Three hundred million people who had been considered less than subjects under the British rule, divided for years by religion, language, class, and caste, would all be united under one book: the revolutionary Constitution given to India by Babasaheb Ambedkar. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. 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 once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. Barrister. Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. [1] Career [ edit] The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. 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. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. [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]. 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.".