Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. 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. Suchitra Vijayan - New Lines Institute I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . She studied Law, Political Science and International Relations, and was trained as a Barrister-at-Law and called to Bar at the Honourable Society of Inner Temple. 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. I have no control over what comes next. Vijayan researches meticulously into official documents and conducts a series of interviews in an effort to uncover the murky truths behind the death of Hilal Ahmed Mir, a supposed militant killed by the military in an encounter in the disputed territory of Kashmir, or Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who was shot when trying to cross the barbed wire at the porous India-Bangladesh border. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. 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'. Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan A Barrister by training, 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 . As a bedouin who grew up listening to beautiful stories from beautiful storytellers around a fire, I was transported by her storytelling. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. Why I Grew Up Wishing My Mother Were Dead - The Bangalore Review How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. Beyond the confusion over the death tolls at Balakot, news organizations variously reported that between 25 and 350 kilograms of the explosive RDX was used in the attack, when no such information was officially released. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. Is that a probable solution? Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. The emotional cost is something else altogether. We see that during the journey, in a number of places, people stood in lines to speak with you, to show their paperwork to youhow did you negotiate the weight ofthose expectations, which might not have been explicit, but were still very much present? Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. 582.1K views. She lives in New York. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? Often, we settle comfortably into describing things as communal riots instead of saying that it was a state-abetted violence, a pogrom, or a brutal massacre. 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. Thats part of the political imagination that I believe we need for political movements or any sustained acts of resistance. Suchitra Vijayan complicates and expands our understanding of the South Asian American experience, urging readers to consider stories that cast dark eyes at India, a strategic ally of many Western nations. More than two weeks after the attack, our analysis finds that no news site had rectified the errors in their reporting, leaving these misleading facts as a matter of public record. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? Suchitra Vijayan on a journey to find a people's history of modern Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. So here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. 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. 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. I find that profoundly inspiring. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. Suchitra Vijayan's new book, Midnight's Borders: A People's 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. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream. It was just a sad moment, and I couldnt celebrate a book when there was so much human tragedy playing out. Sometimes the news is the story. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. 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. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. 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'. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. We need to think about border practices, policing, and national security policies within the larger historical and political contexts. The two officers who avert the attack narrowly escape death but are left with broken bodies and broken lives. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. And this is always at the expense of others. Tamil Movie Articles Trisha | Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya | Tamannah | Anniyan | Aishwarya Rai", "Bigg Boss Awards for each contestant in Bigg Boss Tamil 4", Suchitra: I can sound sweet, sexy, bold or sensual, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suchitra&oldid=1141096550, Crossover episode with Bigg Boss Tamil; Fearless Award, Nominated: Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer Telugu for the song 'Nijamena' from, Nominated: SIIMA Award for Best Female Playback Singer|Best Female Playback Singer for the song 'Sir Osthara' from, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 09:35. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. Her YouTube channel 'Suchislife' has all her updated work. 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. Author, lawyer and journalist, Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Cerebration editor Smita Maitra on her book Midnight's Borders, maps, fragmented identities and postcolonial nation-states. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. 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 Nellie (Assam) too, where over 3,000 Muslims were killed in 1983, people stared at Vijayan in confusion, no one comes here anymore, she was told. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? When fires burn down large swathes of what were peoples homeswhat borders will you impose when climate change will fundamentally remake them? Like most women, I learnt to navigate this toxic misogyny, the threat of sexual violence, and patriarchy by merely existing as a dark-skinned woman in this country. Suchitra Vijayan on Twitter: "Excerpts from the #BBC documentary I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. 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. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. She is currently working on her first novel. They dont. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. 4 reviews of Suchitra Vijayan Photography "Huge fan of Suchitra Vijayan Photography! Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. 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.. 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. 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. On the C-SPAN Networks: Suchitra Vijayan is a Founder and Executive Director for the Project Polis, The with one video in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a . Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) 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. 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. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. Suchitra Vijayan traveled Indias vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just a few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries.. . I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. 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. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. 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. Unreliable Witnesses - Boston Review I have two tests. 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. Atmany points in Midnight's Borders, we see several men in positions of power view the women, who cross over from the 'other' side, as violable. He writes TPS reports for an overbearing boss who calls him the minimum guy. He has replaced eating vada pav at ungodly hours on the streets with overpriced salads. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" At Fazilka near the Pakistan border, she ran into Sari Begum, who had a bunker on her land but had a darker story of pain and violence from the days of Partition. Take a look at theseevents: The vast infrastructure of detention centers being built in Assam and outside; a politician from a ruling party incites violence by saying, goli maaro saalon ko, and remains free; a minister, a Harvard educated technocrat, garlands and celebrates men for the grave crime of lynching; Dr Teltumbde and other BK 16 [the 16 arrests made in the Bhima Koregaon case] political prisoners remain incarcerated with little, no or manufactured evidence for being dissenting subjects; and a standup comic is arrested for the crime of existing as a Muslim. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. After being detained at one of the checkpoints for over two hours, I made my way to one of the villages closest to the Line of Control. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. 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. 10 books like The Home and the World (picked by 7,000+ authors) I have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. A literary community. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. 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. News organizations such as India Today, NDTV, News 18, the Indian Express, First Post, Mumbai Mirror, ANI and others routinely attributed their information to anonymous government sources, forensic experts, police officers and intelligence officers. No independent investigations were conducted, and serious questions about intelligence failures were left unanswered. We cant continue to see this in neo-liberal terms like stakeholder. I think the usage of this kind of language is ineffectual; its emptied of imagination. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. 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. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. 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 Those notes were raw and immediate. SUCHITRA VIJAYAN PHOTOGRAPHY - 42 Photos - Manhatan, NY - Yelp Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. 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. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state She has a sister named, Sunitha. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. 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. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan - The Bangalore Review Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. I dont want to make this about me. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. ", "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.". 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. 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 In Suchitra Vijayan's new book, borders are as arbitrary as history The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for humanising terrorists. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad soon claimed responsibility. Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. What do words like democracy, freedom, and citizenship mean? Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. You will see very little critical commentary or public positions on Hindutva, its corrosive role in India, or how RSS works here in the USfunding and now interfering in US elections. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. 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. She is not alone. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. But who gets to speak for so many of us? Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Also, hope is a discipline. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. 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.
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