Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Your prose is hopeful there. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. Sometimes lost. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? IWE is a body of work where the voices of Indias marginalized are still kept on the fringes; Midnights Borders is anarrative nonfiction book depicting a world that novels from mainland India have failed to depict. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. I feel very uncomfortable talking about this, or rather I dont know how to discuss this without centering myself. 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. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. 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. I dont have apprehensions. The credit goes to my agent Lucy Cleland who suggested this title. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. Sign in. (Stay up to date on new book releases, reviews, and more with The Hindu On Books newsletter. 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.. My role, then, and this books role, is to find in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty.". The emotional cost is something else altogether. I left my 18-month-old daughter to travel and finish this book. Love, passion, anger, the desire to make a point about something. One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. Anvisha Manral March 20, 2021 09:50:40 IST 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). Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. 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. Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices, where native informants are poised to become the voices of the empire. 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. I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. A Barrister by training, 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 . She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. I now think twice about calling friends, worried if this might put them at risk. 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. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Thank you! Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Like most women, I learnt to navigate this toxic misogyny, the threat of sexual violence, and patriarchy by merely existing as a dark-skinned woman in this country. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. 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. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. India and the US are discussing the possibility of jointly developing and manufacturing an extended-range variant of the M777 ultra lightweight howitzer, Qin's first in-person meeting with EAM Jaishankar came on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers conclave in New Delhi amid the over 34-month-long border row in eastern Ladakh. Bigotry is also big business. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. 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. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. This article was published more than4 years ago. Instead, the Indian media has ascribed to itself the role of an amplifier of the government propaganda that took two nuclear states to the brink of war. 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? We dont document violence against the privileged like we would report violence against those without power. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . 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. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Our investigation into the Indian medias reporting on the Pulwama attack found that many reports were contradictory, biased, incendiary and uncorroborated. The book arrived in the middle of a pandemic and a devastating second wave [of COVID-19] in India. Husain Haqqani: Pakistan released the Indian pilot. 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. ", "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.". The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . 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. 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. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Some even dressed for the occasion in combat gear. Be it the teenager who is offered guns, money, and M&M candies to fight the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or Ali, who seeks solace in darkness as the floodlights installed on his plot of land along the India-Bangladesh border leaves him traumatized, or the nonagenarian Johinder Singh Suj from Sindh (a province in present-day Pakistan), who still cherishes his school geography textbook that shows a map of undivided British India the people are captured with deep empathy and come alive in her narration with the adept use of dialogue. 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.