Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. 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. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. What moral and political stands we should take in the face of ongoing oppression. 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. Not everyone lived to see its promises. 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . What matters is that the book exists. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. 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. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. What do these events have in common? Perhaps that offers some protection? You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. 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. When fencing began, he became trapped in a no-mans land, his marriage to a girl from Bangladesh ended with each being stranded on either side and he never got out of the cycle of debt and struggle, finally losing the ability to dream. Many news channels are not only owned, operated or invested in by politically influential families, but also are sometimes run for the express purpose of advancing party positions. But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. Already a subscriber? 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 - Wikipedia 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. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. 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 . Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. When I left him (the first time), I had a one-year-old daughter. We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! L.L.B., Law, The University of Leeds, 2004 M.A., International Relation . 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. As a spy working for TASC, Srikant Tiwari, played by Manoj Bajpayee, has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. So now, how do we respond to this? There is a lot to learn and unlearn, and a writer and a photographer should respond to a political moment, and the work should be a reflection of those practices. The show deals with interesting international happenings. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. 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). 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 . Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. 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. It has taken me over a decade to get here. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. Suchitra Vijayan | C-SPAN.org 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. Suchitra Vijayan. 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. We dont document violence against the privileged like we would report violence against those without power. 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. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. But the number of anonymous sources willing to disclose classified and conflicting information to reporters who cited them without corroboration points to a serious crisis in how information is reported to the public. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. 582.1K views. A Seven Year, 9,000-Mile Journey Along India's Contested Land Borders ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). 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.. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. A poll asked if its OK to be white. Heres why the phrase is loaded. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. While Border Pillar No 1 becomes a convenient stump for children playing cricket along the land that India shares with Bangladesh, roughly 2000 kilometers away in Punjab a woman farmer watches on as the army builds a bunker on the few acres of land she owns. She has a sister named, Sunitha. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. India's Press Crackdown: The Silencing of Journalists in Kashmir 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. Suchitra Vijayan (Author of Midnight's Borders) - Goodreads 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. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. Some things are just not discussed anymore. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. 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. Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. 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. It is also the site of the worlds biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its peopleespecially those living in disputed border regions. 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'. There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. What do you think the future holds? That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. They continue to. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. Suchitra tweets @suchitrav. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. 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. 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. 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. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. 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. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. 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? Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. You need a community of people to support you. 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. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. For far too long, they and their progeny have held power to shape the political understanding of our social worlds. I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Where does that leave us? Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. A place to read, on the Internet. A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. Where India ends and Bangladesh begins is a question confused by history, family and the border pillars themselves. Panitar has a one-foot-high concrete block on the side of the mighty Ichamati river marked Border Pillar No.1. She is currently working on her first novel. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. There are some brilliant writers writing on these issuesthe problem is always that these voices dont make it to the mainstream.