They continue to. 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. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. Even as 70% of the border with Bangladesh has been fenced, smugglers, drug couriers, human traffickers and cattle rustlers continue to cross to ply their trades. All along the border, the common refrain is, It feels like Partition is still alive., A story from near Jalpaiguri in north Bengal, that of a man named Ali, is heartbreaking. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. 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. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. 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. Required fields are marked *. Are you expecting any pushback at all? [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. 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. Where does that leave us? I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. 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. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. 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. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. 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. I still do. They dont. 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. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. This is the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights. 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. 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 . That was my starting point. 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. Why the Modi government lies. First, does my work aid the powerful? The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. 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. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. 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. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. We dont document violence against the privileged like we would report violence against those without power. No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. Christopher Clary: India and Pakistan resort to the diplomacy of violence and flirt with catastrophe, Hafsa Kanjwal: As India beats its war drums over Pulwama, its occupation of Kashmir is being ignored. Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. 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. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. ""The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the state." Antonio Gramsci" Your prose is hopeful there. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Francesca Recchia, a researcher and writer and former director of the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, is the editor and creative director of The Polis Project.. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister, researcher and the author of "Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India." She is the executive director of the Polis Project. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. 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. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India ; Suchitra Vijayan, Context/ Westland Books, 699. This book ate into so much of my life. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Now, along with the medias legitimization of an ideology that promotes violence including riots and lynchings its performance after Pulwama leaves severe doubts as to whether it is engaged in journalism or the propagation of Hindu majoritarianism. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. 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. 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. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. We need more such books. The publishing landscape, including Indian publishing, is deeply flawedit is upper class, upper caste, and deeply alienating for anyone who doesnt come from already established and existing networks of privilege. In the popular depictions of India circulating in the US, we rarely see the stories that the nations jingoistic governments have shoved under the carpet. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. 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. 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 . A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. 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. They cannot be abusive or personal. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. 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. 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. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. 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. 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. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? 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.. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. 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). I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. 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. The complexities of the Naga peace process were apparent on a visit to remote villages of Tuensang district where many of the women remained silent with others admitting they had never encountered an outsider, except Indian soldiers. 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 always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. 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.
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