Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? 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. Your email address will not be published. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. I wanted to make sure that I was writing in a way that was honest and true to my initial reactions, and capture that without centering myself. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. They all have very specific and carefully curated origin/immigrant stories that cleverly exploit the model minority trope. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. 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. 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.
Sometimes lost. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. 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. 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. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? 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. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. 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. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. 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. 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. Also, hope is a discipline. She sang her first song for the movie, Lesa Lesa under the composition of Harris Jayaraj and her co-singer was the legendary, K. S. Chitra. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . 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'. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. . 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. And this is always at the expense of others. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. J.G.P. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. 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? Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Its a vicious cycle. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. She was part of a music band at PSG. 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. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Is that a probable solution? 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. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. 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. Creative . 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. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. The people whose lives are not just materials for the book, who are, in some ways, your co-conspirators in trying to make sense of the social reality. In this stunning work of narrative reportagefeaturing over 40 original photographswe hear from those whose stories are never told: from children playing a cricket match in no-mans-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. 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. 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. 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. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. 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. 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. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. 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. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? As the author notes, here, beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. A. Midnights Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". Updated Date: ). So the question is not: will the future be borderless? 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. The events in Hathras did not happen at the border; neither did the murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence that India has committed in its borderlandsinjustice that has irrigated the glamour and prosperity we witness in what some of us in those borderlands call mainland India. Vijayan, a barrister by profession, is a founding director of Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization in New York.
How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India?
Suchitra Vijayan | The Caravan Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. 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. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. Why the Modi government lies. If it does, I have failed. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. 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. 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. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? Do you think the future is borderless? According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. 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. 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.
Franklin County Citizen Police Blotter,
Toxic Food For Pigs,
Articles S