Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Respond to our political present. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. It took me 8 years to write the book. She studied Law, Political Science and International Relations, and was trained as a Barrister-at-Law and called to Bar at the Honourable Society of Inner Temple. Suchitra Vijayan We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' 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. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. 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. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Always. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. This is a challenging task for the writer. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. 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.". 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. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Are you expecting any pushback at all? They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. Vijayans lens not only captures the people but also the past through objects, such as the picture of Kotwali Gate, the remains of a medieval fort that serves as a border checkpoint rife with weeds and trees growing on it, symbolic of a state bent on rewriting history rather than preserving it. 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. Not everyone lived to see its promises. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade Its a vicious cycle. Required fields are marked *. 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. Barrister. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). 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. 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. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. 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. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? Already a subscriber? Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? 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. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. This discrepancy is just one example of the confusion and misinformation spread to the public by deeply flawed media reports. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Vijayan has travelled 9,000 miles over seven 7 across India's borderline remote areas and has collected many bone-chilling, painful, myth-breaking stories of the people caught in between inter-state disputes because of the lines created by colonial powers who ruled over us for . 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. These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. She writes about war, conflict . Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. . Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. 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. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. 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. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. 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. @suchitrav. 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. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". 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. The mask is off. The arrest of Khurram Parvez shows that India is no Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. 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. But who gets to speak for so many of us? 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. 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.. 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. Updated Date: Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. 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. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. 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. What matters is that the book exists. There is something deeply flawed in the way we live today. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. What do these events have in common? No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. This affects who gets to document, and whom. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. 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. Suchitra Vijayan - Amazon Why the Modi government lies. Vijayan: I wasnt trying to write a hybrid book; I was trying to tell the stories I encountered as a way to think about the moral and political realities of our lives. Suchitra Vijayans new book, Midnights Borders: A Peoples 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. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. There is no denying that the American media landscape is deeply racist, and while the past few years have seen more brown people take center stage, its nowhere close to where we need to be. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. 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. 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? Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. 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. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars.
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