document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. 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. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. 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. In Assam, Vijayan met people devastated by the National Register of Citizens process, with names of long-time residents missing from the final list, and in Kashmir she spent time with a family mourning the loss of their son in an encounter. More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. 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. Ananya is a chaotic humanities student with a deep interest in the relationship between art and society, a writing obsession, and way too many bizarre ideas involving their camera. Suchitra Vijayan. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. 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. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. First, does my work aid the powerful? It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. The images, however, are not all bereft of hope, as children from both India and Bangladesh use a border pillar as a cricket stump, while men on opposing sides of the war on terror in Afghanistan gather around in a cold evening, smoking and sharing stories. . 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. 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. No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. How did you achieve empathy in your writing, without the privileged lens that is common in journalistic canon? Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? 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 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. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. This is a tightrope that you walk so well. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. J.G.P. What is the function of seeing and documenting? It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? 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. A literary community. What matters is that the book exists. For instance, a border security personnel tells her how he failed to capture a photograph of a porcupine after spending half an hour trying to fit a helmet on its head, because he is bored and lonely. '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. They took my land, they stole my life, they stole my future, they took my nightmares and they stole my dreams too. Ali went missing in 2018. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. Updated Date: Perhaps that offers some protection? 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. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. 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. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. You can find them on, The #GBVinMedia Campaign: Media Reportage Of Gender-Based Violence, #IndianWomenInHistory: Remembering The Untold Legacies of Indian Women, How To Write About Abortion: A Rights-Based Approach, The Crowdsourced List Of Social Justice Collectives Across Indian Campuses. 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. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. And this is always at the expense of others. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. What do you think the future holds? 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? Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . The Indian government bears some responsibility for this: Amid this brinkmanship between the two nuclear powers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. Required fields are marked *. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. 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. Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019)
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