The border runs through him, his friend Jamshed had told Vijayan, He is almost gone, but I dont want his story to be gone too.. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. What matters is that the book exists. It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Suchitra Acharjee - Graduate Assistant - The University of Texas Rio A relatively small group of people runs it. Sometimes they are no more, but your storytelling is so invigorating that the reader doesnt forget them. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. Suchitra Vijayan talks to FII about Indian politics, communal violence, marginalisation and her book Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India. 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. 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. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. 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. The events in Hathras did not happen at the border; neither did the murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. Are you expecting any pushback at all? Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. 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. Sometimes lost. . More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. They all have very specific and carefully curated origin/immigrant stories that cleverly exploit the model minority trope. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. Those notes were raw and immediate. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. 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. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. 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. Vijayan: Chopra and others like her are a reflection of how popular culture and virality inform discourse and shape it. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. India shares borders with a host of . 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. 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 . Were there times when you doubted your own ability to record and document these people's stories? These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. Sometimes the news is the story. Its a practice. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan - The Bangalore Review 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. All rights reserved. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. It is truly the treason of the intellectuals. We could have attributed this to ignorance even a few years back; now its just silence thats deeply complicit in the Hindutva project. Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? Also, hope is a discipline. This might not seem like much, but it is absolutely essential. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. Perhaps that offers some protection? What do these events have in common? Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. In the first season, when he and his team are tasked to thwart the terrorist attack Operation Zulfiqar, the plot moves from Mumbai to Kashmir. 582.1K views. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. I was reading a lot of Pessoa when I was in Afghanistan, so another placeholder title was 'Maps/Lines/Cartographies of Disquiet', inspired by the Book of Disquiet. 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. The government, of course, denies this. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. 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. 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. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. However, at work, Tiwari is in his element. ", "Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidenceyetthe genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy, and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.". Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. If it does, I have failed. She still does a radio show called Flight983 on Radio Mirchi, on Sunday evenings (79 pm). As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? 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. Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan 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. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. How do you protect this child? These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. Vijayan: Most Indian American writers, especially many of them who occupy the broad spectrum of literary to punditry, come from immense privilege of caste and class. Opinion | After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJP's And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? Suchitra Vijayan For instance, if you went to school with, say, Indias most powerful publisher, or your dad plays golf or socialised at the Gymkhana with the politically powerful and the culturally influential, then that system is built to get you the resources. She is the executive director of the Polis Project . 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. It took me 8 years to write the book. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. By looking beyond maps to create a museum of forgotten stories, Vijayan has given voice to those who live on the fringes like Ali or Sari. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them. 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. Sari Begum, born of rape during the Partition and married off to a violent, alcoholic man twenty years older than her, is forced to part with her land to make space for an army bunker, while Natasha Javed stumbles upon a piece of family history that reveals her ancestor being killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 and the subsequent trauma and loss of having to be forcefully emptied of history when they crossed over to Pakistan, and how talking about this would make them traitors in their homeland.
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