In the first season, when he and his team are tasked to thwart the terrorist attack Operation Zulfiqar, the plot moves from Mumbai to Kashmir. In another essay from 2019, I write about the banality of bearing witness as an excuse to produce extractive work. These questions about documentation practices started long before I started this book project, and I learnt along the way. But your book lays bare how differently India's borders are guarded from southern Bengal to the Line of Control. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. Bigotry is also big business. The images, however, are not all bereft of hope, as children from both India and Bangladesh use a border pillar as a cricket stump, while men on opposing sides of the war on terror in Afghanistan gather around in a cold evening, smoking and sharing stories. 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. Barrister. 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. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. Instead, we need to ask what fate awaits us. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. Its impossible for a writer not to be affected by their personal life. I think these are fundamental questions of freedom and dignity. Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. 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. We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! 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. 2:16. They took my land, they stole my life, they stole my future, they took my nightmares and they stole my dreams too. Ali went missing in 2018. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. ""The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the state." Antonio Gramsci" We must realise that its the grassroots media, who represent themselves, document what mainstream media ignores, and bring to notice what is important. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. Its not sustainable, it fractures who we are, chips away and erodes what it fundamentally means to be human. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. She is not alone. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Sometimes the news is the story. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. suchitrav. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. As a trained barrister, I used to believe in the concept of justicebut now I simply call this freedom and dignity. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Rumpus: I believe your book contributes to an important conversation about India we must have right now in the United States, for its own sake. 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'. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? 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. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Always. This means that, for the longest time, the depiction of violence and marginalised communities has been problematic. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. 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. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. 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. Your prose is hopeful there. The mortality of someone you love affects how you write. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. We cant continue to see this in neo-liberal terms like stakeholder. I think the usage of this kind of language is ineffectual; its emptied of imagination. 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. In 2020, Suchitra took part in the fourth season of the Tamil reality television show, Bigg Boss Tamil hosted by Kamal Haasan. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle. They create cleavages of fear, xenophobia, and insecurity. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. 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. 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Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. Perhaps that offers some protection? Its not comparable and should not be compared. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. This contributed to the long-running, brutal silencing of Kashmiris and their struggle for self-determination. The emotional cost is something else altogether. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. Q: You had to deal with a lot of ethical considerations as a writer and photographer, which echo throughout your and your fellow journalists work, as evaluated in your book. Say, for instance, do we need a James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia? You become responsible for a human being. 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. The government, of course, denies this. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Early on, the idea of bearing witness as a rhetorical tool and as a literary device became deeply problematic. Even as 70% of the border with Bangladesh has been fenced, smugglers, drug couriers, human traffickers and cattle rustlers continue to cross to ply their trades. All along the border, the common refrain is, It feels like Partition is still alive., A story from near Jalpaiguri in north Bengal, that of a man named Ali, is heartbreaking. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. What do words like democracy, freedom, and citizenship mean? 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. 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. 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. I can see how religious Hindu fanaticism has started to spread its tentacles in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, and this is primarily because of an absence of balanced stories about India. 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. 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. Why the Modi government lies. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? There was an NDTV programme, where somebody said Should Indias constitution be secularist? [2] She became known as Rj Suchi, with her popular morning show Hello Chennai. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. 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. This affects who gets to document, and whom. 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. So the question is not: will the future be borderless? But who carries the responsibility of that fear? 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 . 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). She writes about war, conflict . From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. 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. At Fazilka near the Pakistan border, she ran into Sari Begum, who had a bunker on her land but had a darker story of pain and violence from the days of Partition. Time to let the diplomats do the hard talk. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. The word terrorism, for instance, is used almost exclusively to refer to a particular communitybut fails to refer to state-enabled terror or the terror deployed by majority communities. 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. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Suchitra Vijayan. 4 reviews of Suchitra Vijayan Photography "Huge fan of Suchitra Vijayan Photography! What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. Check posts or bunkers were not part of the landscapes of my home. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. In that process, her reportage unravels the cultural and political implicationsof our bordersonour 'collective conscience', as capricious as that might be, and on the lives of those sandwiched between two warring nations. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. Rumpus: The book derives its emotional strength and narrative energy from the stories of people you encounter at the borders. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!'

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