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Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. This article was published more than4 years ago. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. So the first reflection is this idea of where we are right now: as people, as a society, as a community. The interview has been paraphrased and condensed for clarity, at the interviewers discretion. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Also, hope is a discipline. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: ""Fighting for justice and human rights in How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). In her new book Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. 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. Suchitra Vijayan. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. 582.1K views. I spoke with Suchitra by email in July about Midnights Borders, the power of literary nonfiction, new possibilities of Indian American literature, neoliberal politics, and the importance of supporting underrepresented stories. Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliots, Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves, RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris, The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. This is a serious, often funny and deeply revealing book. M, An essential, beautifully written report from the hellish margins of a modern mega-state struggling to be a nation, of people whose lives continue to be shaped by violent political marches across age-old homes and habitats. Do you think the future is borderless? Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. I have no control over what comes next. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Perhaps that offers some protection? I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. The government, of course, denies this. 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. In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. IWE is a body of work where the voices of Indias marginalized are still kept on the fringes; Midnights Borders is anarrative nonfiction book depicting a world that novels from mainland India have failed to depict. 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). 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? 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 . Find him on Twitter at @AruniKashyap. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. 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. She has a sister named, Sunitha. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. 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. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. Second, as the media continued to promote government positions on the crisis, other critical political issues dropped out of public scrutiny. It is truly the treason of the intellectuals. We could have attributed this to ignorance even a few years back; now its just silence thats deeply complicit in the Hindutva project. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. 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. While that incident had a profound impact on me, my politics, how I think about violence, its relationship to justice, or the lack of it, this is not the same kind of violence Kashmiris have been subjugated to. Feminism In India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist media organisation to learn, educate and develop a feminist sensibility among the youth. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . Atmany points in Midnight's Borders, we see several men in positions of power view the women, who cross over from the 'other' side, as violable. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. 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? 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. 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? We need more such books. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). 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. 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. Despite the failures in investigation and prosecution related to criminal trials arising out of the pogrom, the judiciary has projected itself as an able and willing neutral arbiter of justice that is not complicit with the deep structures of Hindutvas anti-Muslim prejudice https://t.co/EFf5bxYEBt, True societal change has always emerged from the ground-up, with communities fighting for their own freedom and dignity. She has also been appreciated for her honest and positive-humour-filled judging at reality shows like Vijay TV's Airtel Super Singer, Sun TV's Sun Singer, Asianet's Music India, and Bol Baby Bol on Gemini TV and Surya TV. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir In another essay from 2019, I write about the banality of bearing witness as an excuse to produce extractive work. These questions about documentation practices started long before I started this book project, and I learnt along the way. 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. 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. So I try to learn and listen, and again, as I say in this book, "It is not my goal to 'bear witness' or 'give voice to the voiceless'. 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. In Suchitra Vijayan's new book, borders are as arbitrary as history Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. There are also those who have previously been tacit, if not active, supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Indian state. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. There are two quotes I regularly use by Allan Sekula when I teach: "The making of a human likeness on film is a political act. Last edited on 23 February 2023, at 09:35, Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer Telugu, 2nd South Indian International Movie Awards, "Suchitra going through certain emotional condition: Husband Karthik on her tweets", "Will Trisha sound like Trisha in Mankatha? 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. 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. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. Suchitra Vijayan I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. 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. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. In this podcast, Vijayan discusses with host Alex Woodson her 9,000-mile journey through India's borderlands, which formed the basis of the book, and she discusses the violent and continuing history of the 1947 partition, the stark differences and similarities along South Asia's various borders, and what "citizenship" mean in India in 2021 and The emotional cost is something else altogether. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. 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. 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. The mask is off. The arrest of Khurram Parvez shows that India is no Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. 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. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. At Fazilka near the Pakistan border, she ran into Sari Begum, who had a bunker on her land but had a darker story of pain and violence from the days of Partition. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. Suchitra Vijayan (Author of Midnight's Borders) - Goodreads Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . 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. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. 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. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. 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. A Seven Year, 9,000-Mile Journey Along India's Contested Land Borders Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. suchitrav. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. Its not comparable and should not be compared. They cannot be abusive or personal. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. 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. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. Thank you! Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. 10 books like The Home and the World (picked by 7,000+ authors) Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. Rohini Menon for Feminism in India, FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation, Institutional Violence & Political Imagination, 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. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. 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. Global Ethics Review: Midnight's Borders, with Suchitra Vijayan Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. She lives in New York. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: 2:16. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. You need a community of people to support you. Suchitra - Wikipedia Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. 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. Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. 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. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Copyright 2023. Suchitra Vijayan | The Caravan It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. 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.". I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. I dont have apprehensions. 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. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. So now, how do we respond to this? Its a vicious cycle. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. 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? 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. Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. Required fields are marked *. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? In her book, she makes her intention clear at the very beginning, claiming that this endeavor is not to give voice to the voiceless but to critique the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty. She acknowledges that a book in its limited scope cannot really encapsulate the entirety of this journey, and it will remain more of a scrapbook, a collection of images, texts, poetry, and maps.