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. 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. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. 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. Not mine. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. 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 Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Part of this process is a need to turn the lens back at the powerful. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. I had a very stable home to come back to. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. It took a long time to get the voice right. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. 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. To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them. 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. More importantly, reporters need to engage with what it means to administer what has been called the worlds most militarized zone. Only then can the country answer a more fundamental question: Just what should be done to create conditions that allow Kashmiris to choose their destiny? Dear reader, this article is free to read and it will remain free but it isnt free to produce. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. When your investigations in Kashmir came to an end, what changes did you observe in your 'grammar of dissent'? 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. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. What is the function of seeing and documenting? We thank her for her time, patience, and illuminating insights into her work. 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. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. 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. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. ""The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the state." Antonio Gramsci" 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. Suchitra Vijayan: The Indian state has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether its the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland Now the international viewfor instance while the Gujarat riots of 2002 brought critical international media attention and criticism, and [current Prime Minister] Modi was banned from entering the US, India was able to effectively manage global public opinion. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. She is currently working on her first novel. This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan - The Bangalore Review 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. 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. Updated Date: Vijayan began her journey in Kolkata. 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. 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. At the end of it, I felt that I learnt more about myself, more about my home, I had becomeif not a better writer, an infinitely better human being, which is to say that one realises that theres always a Longue dure that one needs to consider, crave out time and space to think, train oneself not to always react. . India's Press Crackdown: The Silencing of Journalists in Kashmir 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. Bigotry is also big business. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. Suchitra Vijayan > Faculty > People > NYU Gallatin She was part of a music band at PSG. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence . That was my starting point. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. 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. 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. A: This geopolitical violence is not new, theres a long bloody, brutal history to thisa cyclical, ongoing and never-ending history. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. But for me hope is radical; hope is the last bastion of our defense. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. 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. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. It took me 8 years to write the book. 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? 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'. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. 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. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. Q: What struck me about your work was its immersive style.