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. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. Rumpus: I believe your book contributes to an important conversation about India we must have right now in the United States, for its own sake. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. Midnights Borders perhaps also critiques the widely read body of work available as Indian English Writing (IWE), a literary canon that has so far told the story of India but seldom demonstrated social responsibility by acknowledging the atrocities India has committed silently within its borders. So now, how do we respond to this? 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. My friend Ritesh Uttamchandani said this once, the lens that elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed is often impossible to bridge. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. I dont have apprehensions. We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. 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. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. Thank you! The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. 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. 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. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. Midnight's Bordersis an exceptional read, but one that may make some uncomfortable. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Founder & ExecDirector: @project_polis @watchthestate ; Teach @nyugallatin Writer Manhattan, NY linktr.ee/suchitravijayan Born April 14 Joined May 2008 8,013 Following 80.8K Followers Tweets & replies Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. This is not the violent right wing and their siege; its centrist and liberal media that is also relitigating history, deconstructing the core values of the constitution. 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. 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. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? It took a long time to get the voice right. In season two, a quick flashback resolves the plotline from the previous season. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. 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. This affects who gets to document, and whom. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Perhaps thats their victory. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. She was part of a music band at PSG. Its a vicious cycle. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. 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. Suchitra Vijayan. I wrote a book along with it comes love, scorn, and sometimes even ridicule. 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. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. 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. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. She writes about war, conflict . Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . 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. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. No one can write a book alone. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. What do you think the future holds? Not mine. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. 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. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? 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. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. 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. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. 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). Suchitra Vijayan: The Indian state has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether its the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland Now the international viewfor instance while the Gujarat riots of 2002 brought critical international media attention and criticism, and [current Prime Minister] Modi was banned from entering the US, India was able to effectively manage global public opinion. Why the Modi government lies. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. 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. The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. As a graduate student at Yale, she researched and documented stories along the Af-Pak border and was embedded with the US forces in Afghanistan. [6], She wrote a short story, a graphic illustration of an episode in the life of a black peppercorn called Kuru-Milaku, called "The Runaway Peppercorn".[7]. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. But for me hope is radical; hope is the last bastion of our defense. I still do. 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 writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. Bhawan Singh, who photographed the Nellie massacre, said he had never seen anything like it. 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. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations 'The border making project is central to the capitalist and neoliberal logic,' Vijayan says. 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. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. 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 do these events have in common? Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. 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'. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member. 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. 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.

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