This income helps us keep the magazine alive. 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. 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. What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. Vijayan is no stranger to stories of violence. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. Without a political solution, Kashmir will undoubtedly emerge in upcoming news cycles. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. She lives in New York. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and . I dont want to make this about me. 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. As a lawyer, journalist, and human rights activist who has worked in conflict-ridden territories of Kosovo, Egypt, Rwanda, and elsewhere, she has often met people scrambling for bare existence, caught in a no-mans land. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. It offers brief historical notes on how the nations current borders came into force alongside accounts of increasing militarisation, disputes, little massacres and forgotten pogroms, no-mans-lands, and the people through whom the border runs like barbed wire. Can you write about loss without living? Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. 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. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". 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. 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. Be it the teenager who is offered guns, money, and M&M candies to fight the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or Ali, who seeks solace in darkness as the floodlights installed on his plot of land along the India-Bangladesh border leaves him traumatized, or the nonagenarian Johinder Singh Suj from Sindh (a province in present-day Pakistan), who still cherishes his school geography textbook that shows a map of undivided British India the people are captured with deep empathy and come alive in her narration with the adept use of dialogue. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. FII Media Private Limited | All rights reserved, "Imagine how it would be for someone coming from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, working class background, who wants to come into thisit is especially difficult if youre a woman coming from these backgrounds. 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. He drops and picks up his kids from school, pines for his old job and is concerned about the newly-formed government in Pakistanall the while trying to salvage his crumbling marriage. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. 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. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. More importantly, reporters need to engage with what it means to administer what has been called the worlds most militarized zone. Only then can the country answer a more fundamental question: Just what should be done to create conditions that allow Kashmiris to choose their destiny? He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. Those notes were raw and immediate. 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? 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'. 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. In her new book You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. 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. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" We no longer ask if this will lead to a better society, if it will benefit the vast majority of those farthest away from power. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. 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. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. 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. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for humanising terrorists. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . 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. We cant continue to see this in neo-liberal terms like stakeholder. I think the usage of this kind of language is ineffectual; its emptied of imagination. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. When fencing began, he became trapped in a no-mans land, his marriage to a girl from Bangladesh ended with each being stranded on either side and he never got out of the cycle of debt and struggle, finally losing the ability to dream. 'Music I Like', an album of Suchitra's renditions of Mahakavi Bharatiyaar's poetry, set to contemporary tunes and music, released by Universal Music, was a turning point in her career. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. 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. She has a sister named, Sunitha. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. 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. 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? 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.. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. Suchitra Vijayan. Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. 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. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? 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. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. Where does that leave us? That changes how you write and photograph a place.