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. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. I still do. Vijayan is no stranger to stories of violence. Contributions for the charitable purposes ofThe Rumpus must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . Chopra is popular because she satisfies a certain need for validationthe trope of brown representation where the mere act of being represented is seen as a singular virtue worth applauding. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. What is the function of seeing and documenting? How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. 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. 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. No one is a stakeholder herethese are people, humans, citizens, who have been deprived of what the Ambedkarite constitution promised them. It took a long time to get the voice right. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. 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). 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. They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. The government, of course, denies this. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. 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. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. 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. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. 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. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. O. 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. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? 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. India shares borders with a host of . Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. This is a challenging task for the writer. 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. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. 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. As the author notes, here, beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. A. Midnights Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building. In her new book Its feudal, entitled, and cannibalistic. The pair experience similar situations in their lives: abuse, the death or absence of a husband, and the longing for a better future. 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. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. Fearful of the future he asked quietly, Where did all this hate come from, where is it going to take us? echoing what many residents had told her. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. This article was published more than4 years ago. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. She lucidly explains the complicated history of the McMahon Line, how the India-China border is the result of a fabrication perpetuated by the British colonial administration. I had a very stable home to come back to. What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. A t a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayan's Midnight's Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of India's nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. She is not alone. A literary community. Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry, The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif, Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar, These Are The 15 Women Who Helped Draft The Indian Constitution, Gender Roles And Stereotyping In To Kill A Mockingbird, A Brief Summary Of The Second Wave Of Feminism, A Brief Summary Of The First Wave Of Feminism, Kamala Das The Mother Of Modern Indian English Poetry | #IndianWomenInHistory, A Brief Summary Of The Third Wave Of Feminism, The Life And Times Of Dnyanjyoti Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule | #IndianWomenInHistory, FII Interviews: Charlotte Munch Bengtsen Talks About Women In Filmmaking, FII Interviews: Drag King And Influencer Mx. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. Over the past 15 years, small democratisation through social media has enabled challenging these practices. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. The taxi driver who describes the Egyptian revolution in five minutes to an American columnist (who speaks no Arabic) is sadly where the genre is today. I dont have apprehensions. Vijayan: There is an elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed that cant be bridged. 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. Feminism In India is an award-winning digital intersectional feminist media organisation to learn, educate and develop a feminist sensibility among the youth. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. Excerpts from the #BBC documentary telecast about PM . Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles was grievously underreported. As a spy working for TASC, Tiwari has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. 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. Already a subscriber? This is the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. Your email address will not be published. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. Do you think the future is borderless? Also read: The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif. You become responsible for a human being. Propaganda and poison work in far more sophisticated ways. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. 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. 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? She lives in New York. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. 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. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? Those notes were raw and immediate. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Suchitra Vijayan's debut book, Midnight's Borders, is a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.The book recounts the author's recent journey across India's land borders covering 9000 miles over a span of seven years. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. 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. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. I have no control over what comes next. Where does that leave us? Can you write about loss without living? I cant think in terms of the future being borderless, I can only think in terms of fracturing. There are already about 20 million climate refugees around South Asias borderlands. 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. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. During the initial search, the BSF troops recovered a black coloured drone - DJI Matrice (made in China), in partially damaged condition, lying near Dhussi Bundh near Shahjada village. 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. Perhaps thats their victory. We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Q: Speaking about the content of the work, by including under-represented perspectives on the frequently debated partition and border laws you present a novel perspective to journalistic canon. 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. This book ate into so much of my life. Updated Date: 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. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. India and its Borderlands: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Sharjeel Usmani, Book talk with Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnights Borders, Crisis at the Border: Contestation, Sovereignty, and Statelessness. They continue to. I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. Are you expecting any pushback at all? 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. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times.
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