Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? A literary community. 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. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. She has a sister named, Sunitha. I spoke with Suchitra by email in July about Midnights Borders, the power of literary nonfiction, new possibilities of Indian American literature, neoliberal politics, and the importance of supporting underrepresented stories. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. [1], Suchitra joined Sify for a year, after graduating. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Its a practice. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? But Pakistan responded by rejecting these claims and told the Associated Press that the area was mostly deserted wooded area and that there were no casualties or damage on the ground. 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. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. 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 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. What matters is that the book exists. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? . The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. There are some notable exceptions, but they are an exception. . I almost never forget, I remember entire episodes or events since I was six years old. The Indian media must learn to portray the conflict and human rights violations in the region in a more nuanced way, and not reduce Kashmir to a catalogue of death, destruction and emergency laws. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. Commentary Politics. There are also those who have previously been tacit, if not active, supporters of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Indian state. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. Those notes were raw and immediate. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. Suchitra Vijayan - KeyWiki A memorable, humane museum of forgotten stories that we must all read and remember. M, What experiences and lives unfold in these pages. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. Some things are just not discussed anymore. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. At worst, its navel gazing peppered with white guilt, but always politically vacuous. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. 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. You become responsible for a human being. The book is a prelude to what was coming, and is also a impassioned plea to my readers to ask some fundamental questions of what it means to live in a country like Indiawhat is the function of a state when its primary preoccupation is no longer the citizen but a performance of an ideology? You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. 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.. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. A place to read, on the Internet. Suchitra Vijayan on a journey to find a people's history of modern Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . @narendramodi & his role in the Gujarat Pogrom. 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. Also read: Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry. What we can do is attempt micro-histories of events, timelines, or local communities. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. The argument put forward was simple: India, like most countries, had its human rights violations, but these were characterized as the growing pains and maturation of the worlds largest democracy. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. She has a sister named, Sunitha. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. 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. This affects who gets to document, and whom. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. Suchitra was married to actor Karthik Kumar between 2005 and 2017. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. 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. Already a subscriber? 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . After her Twitter page was hacked in 2016, and the pictures and videos released by the hacker went viral under #suchileaks, following a spate of bad press owing to the fact that she only released a statement on Sun News saying she was focused on shutting the page down, Suchitra left for London to pursue culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). 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. I think its the other way round, these communities have always been speaking, writing, documenting, teachingwe must simply listen rather than represent them in any way. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. I dont want to make this about me. 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. And that violence is often abetted by the state and goes unpunished. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. As such, very few media establishments in India have been able to stand against the influence of political leaders. Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Suchitra Acharjee - Graduate Assistant - The University of Texas Rio We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? This book ate into so much of my life. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) 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. One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. 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? 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. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. At a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayans Midnights Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of Indias nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. A: Writers are very strange creatures. The emotional cost is something else altogether. This is a challenging task for the writer. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. With sharp political analyses, dense historical research and lyrical, image-rich prose, Vijayans journalism displays an inspiring ethic, one that is invested in the micro-histories of the small man, the one existing on the fringes of history and the one that most requires urgent representation. B, A book that will enlighten every citizen of every nation. She lives in New York. Suchitra - Wikipedia You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. 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. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. 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. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. 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.. Where does that leave us? A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. We dont document violence against the privileged like we would report violence against those without power. Suchitra Vijayan. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. That was my starting point. I think this book will change the global conversation about India and shape what gets written in the future about India. 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. 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.