This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. 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. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? She is the executive director of the Polis Project . Suchitra Vijayan (Author of Midnight's Borders) - Goodreads There are two quotes I regularly use by Allan Sekula when I teach: "The making of a human likeness on film is a political act. In that process, her reportage unravels the cultural and political implicationsof our bordersonour 'collective conscience', as capricious as that might be, and on the lives of those sandwiched between two warring nations. 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. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. 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'. @suchitrav. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJPs propaganda machine, Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates, Fox News bosses scolded reporters who challenged false election claims, To fight defamation suit, Fox News cites election conspiracy theories. Midnights Borders , Suchitra Vijayan includes a photo of the pillar, which becomes a cricket stump for boys on either side of the border most days. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. First, does my work aid the powerful? It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. Always. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. 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 . No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Opinion | After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJP's We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. 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. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. Thank you! Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the worlds largest democracy and second most populous country. I find that profoundly inspiring. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. 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. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. 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.. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. 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. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. 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 was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. [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]. Heartbreaking, and still, something we must all notice and understand. M, Unique and ambitious, Vijayans project gains urgency and significance from our moment of resurgent nationalisms, when borders are being aggressively reasserted, in India and across the globe. G, An intervention like no other when it comes to thinking through not just the history of India but for reflections on borders, migration, the elusory nature of nations. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. What do words like democracy, freedom, and citizenship mean? Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. 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. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. 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. Already a subscriber? The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. Categories. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. In her new book These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. Suchitra Vijayan undertook a 9000 mile journey over seven years to India's borderlands to write Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. There are also those who have previously been tacit, if not active, supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Indian state. Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia In this era when Indian armed forces and the police act with absolute impunity, a handful of local news outlets play an essential role in reporting and. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. Travel to States like Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in the Northeast which share borders with China and Myanmar required Inner Line Permits, BSF soldiers followed her everywhere on the West Bengal/ Bangladesh border, and in Kashmir she was summoned to meet the local inspector at Uri. She is not alone. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. Creative . Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? The nation-state and its ruling class view borders as very different from the people who inhabit these liminal spaces or communities that have been affected by border making and policing practices. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Sometimes the news is the story. Three hundred million people who had been considered less than subjects under the British rule, divided for years by religion, language, class, and caste, would all be united under one book: the revolutionary Constitution given to India by Babasaheb Ambedkar. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. . Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. 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. Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. 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. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. Its been a little over a week since the book came out, and every day this week, I have woken up to emails, messages, and DMs from readers. You can claim to be patriotic but not political, you can claim to support the troops but ignore the ongoing civilian casualty. 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. How did writing this book affect you? Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. Q: You had to deal with a lot of ethical considerations as a writer and photographer, which echo throughout your and your fellow journalists work, as evaluated in your book. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. 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. Rohini Menon for Feminism in India, FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation, Institutional Violence & Political Imagination, 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. She still does a radio show called Flight983 on Radio Mirchi, on Sunday evenings (79 pm). In her book, she makes her intention clear at the very beginning, claiming that this endeavor is not to give voice to the voiceless but to critique the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty. She acknowledges that a book in its limited scope cannot really encapsulate the entirety of this journey, and it will remain more of a scrapbook, a collection of images, texts, poetry, and maps. 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.
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