We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. 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. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. But for me hope is radical; hope is the last bastion of our defense. 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. Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. Rumpus: Toni Morrison said that she writes from a place of delight, not disappointment. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. 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. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . We once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project..
Suchitra Vijayan Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? 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. According to a new World Health Organization report, we lost as many as 4.7 million people in India. The travel, the people they encounter, and the political events they record quickly become cameos. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. 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. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? Subscribe here. . A: Writers are very strange creatures. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. You can claim to be patriotic but not political, you can claim to support the troops but ignore the ongoing civilian casualty. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith.
Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? 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. Suchitra Vijayan. Vijayans lens not only captures the people but also the past through objects, such as the picture of Kotwali Gate, the remains of a medieval fort that serves as a border checkpoint rife with weeds and trees growing on it, symbolic of a state bent on rewriting history rather than preserving it. Required fields are marked *. 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. 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? 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. The Author Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. But who gets to speak for so many of us? She is actively involved in circulating urgent and underrepresented news from the world through her online platform. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. She completed her MFA in Writing (Fiction) from the University of San Francisco where she was awarded the Jan Zivic Fellowship and is about to begin her PhD in English with a Creative Dissertation from the University of Georgia, Athens. That was my starting point. 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. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. You need a community of people to support you. They cannot be abusive or personal. Then you sit in a room with a mother telling you that she has no idea what happened to her son and has no way of knowing if hes ever coming back.
Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan 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.. 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. We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work.
Hope Is the Last Bastion: Talking with Suchitra Vijayan Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. 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. The public is sold a lie as the attack is framed as a gas leak. Its a practice. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. Jawaharlal Nehrus 'Tryst with Destiny'is a speech I have returned to over the past 20 years. Vijayans book begins a much-needed conversation on thinking about freedom beyond the idea of nation and its illusory lines. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. Q: You frequently describe certain borders as porous. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders.
Suchitra Vijayan | The Caravan Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Categories. The book was originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile journey along the borders of India, and interviews people living in these liminal spaces. Despite the failures in investigation and prosecution related to criminal trials arising out of the pogrom, the judiciary has projected itself as an able and willing neutral arbiter of justice that is not complicit with the deep structures of Hindutvas anti-Muslim prejudice https://t.co/EFf5bxYEBt, True societal change has always emerged from the ground-up, with communities fighting for their own freedom and dignity. Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. 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. In her new book Sometimes the news is the story. This is not the violent right wing and their siege; its centrist and liberal media that is also relitigating history, deconstructing the core values of the constitution. Follow our team of columnists and reporters who write about the media. 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. No one can write a book alone. 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. 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. Its a dangerous moment where the figure of the rights-bearing citizen is being reduced to a consuming subject. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. My friend Ritesh Uttamchandani said this once, the lens that elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed is often impossible to bridge. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. Can you write about loss without living?
SUCHITRA VIJAYAN PHOTOGRAPHY - 42 Photos - Manhatan, NY - Yelp [4] She also worked as a dubbing artist for popular heroines like Shriya Saran and Lakshmi Rai.[5]. [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].
In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness Even those who now write about Modis India, will never write about Brahmanism or be critical of how caste works in the diaspora. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region.
Suchitra Vijayan 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.
10 books like The Home and the World (picked by 7,000+ authors) I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. Perhaps there are lessons to learn from that. 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. It was not going to be easy as she quickly found out. Suchitra Vijayans new book, Midnights Borders: A Peoples 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. 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. 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. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe set foot in India for the first time in July, 1947 to draw the borders and completed the task within seven weeks, engendering communal riots, a heavily militarized border, four wars and seven decades of violence and hatred between the two countries. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. J.G.P. The publishing landscape, including Indian publishing, is deeply flawedit is upper class, upper caste, and deeply alienating for anyone who doesnt come from already established and existing networks of privilege. What do these events have in common? Vijayan: I wasnt trying to write a hybrid book; I was trying to tell the stories I encountered as a way to think about the moral and political realities of our lives. You dont need a Leni Riefenstahl today. I have two tests. 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. You can speak of confidence and body positivity and defend selling skin-lightening creams. Her writing and award-winning photography culminated in Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, which was recently shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF book prize. 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. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. Are you expecting any pushback at all? When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. ", "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.". Midnight's Bordersis an exceptional read, but one that may make some uncomfortable. 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). Copyright 2023. 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. 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. I find that profoundly inspiring.
They all have very specific and carefully curated origin/immigrant stories that cleverly exploit the model minority trope. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST. The second season of The Family Man begins with Srikant Tiwari, a former intelligence officer of TASCa fictitious intelligence agency akin to the Research & Analysis Wingworking at an IT company. A: This is a very loaded question. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. In Assam, Vijayan met people devastated by the National Register of Citizens process, with names of long-time residents missing from the final list, and in Kashmir she spent time with a family mourning the loss of their son in an encounter. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. 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. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. 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. We know that the purpose of borders has kept changing for nations. 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. There is something deeply flawed in the way we live today. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. 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. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. But who carries the responsibility of that fear? A:I dont think an ethical or moral compass exists nowI dont know if it ever existed. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten.
Unreliable Witnesses - Boston Review There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. In recent years, the narrative of hate has escalated with the reelection of the right-wing Narendra Modi government in 2019. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing.
Suchitra Vijayan | C-SPAN.org If she wasnt real she would be a marriage between a meme and parody. It offers brief historical notes on how the nations current borders came into force alongside accounts of increasing militarisation, disputes, little massacres and forgotten pogroms, no-mans-lands, and the people through whom the border runs like barbed wire. 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. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?"
Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. This affects who gets to document, and whom. More importantly, as Babasaheb would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. It has taken me over a decade to get here. As she travelled 9000 miles over seven years across Indias borders, some drawn so hastily that they cut across fields, homes and courtyards, she met men, women and children, finishing with endless notebooks, over a thousand images and more than 300 hours of recorded conversations. Her quest took her to the farthest ends of the India-Bangladesh/ China/ Myanmar/ Pakistan borders. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. 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. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. You can carefully craft a narrative of immigrant success but act tone-deaf about the ongoing refugee crisis. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. But it needs to do more for peace. 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. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. 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. Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value.
In Suchitra Vijayan's new book, borders are as arbitrary as history It is here that even the most civilised amongst us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence.
Looking Beyond the Lines: Suchitra Vijayan's "Midnight's Borders" Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. I had a very stable home to come back to. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. 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.