She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. What do these events have in common? The events of 9/11 had profound effects on how border security projects and politics played out. The former is an essential act of dissent, even resistance, especially in these dark times. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. In this podcast, Vijayan discusses with host Alex Woodson her 9,000-mile journey through India's borderlands, which formed the basis of the book, and she discusses the violent and continuing history of the 1947 partition, the stark differences and similarities along South Asia's various borders, and what "citizenship" mean in India in 2021 and I think freedom and dignity enables us to really go beyond in our political imaginationbeyond just electoral politics. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them. 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'. She entered the show on day 28 as a new contestant and was evicted on day 49. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. 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. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. I test my practice of writing or being a photographer against this rule. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. And our language helps us imagine a vision that is truly just, beautiful and ethical. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. 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. There is a lot to learn and unlearn, and a writer and a photographer should respond to a political moment, and the work should be a reflection of those practices. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. As I say in the book, Kashmir changed me, it gave me political and moral clarity to always stand with those fighting for their peoples freedom and dignity. Legislations such as National Register of Citizens and Citizenship Amendment Act threaten to render millions of people, especially Muslims, stateless. Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. Sometimes they are no more, but your storytelling is so invigorating that the reader doesnt forget them. She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. 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. When I finished writing, I had become much richer in many waysnot in a material waybut through a community. Its a vicious cycle. Now imagine how it would be for someone from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, or working community to try to make inroads. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. A relatively small group of people runs it. As a graduate student at Yale, she researched and documented stories along the Af-Pak border and was embedded with the US forces in Afghanistan. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. 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. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer, political essayist, and a lecturer. She digs deep into colonial history to show how years of violence and consequential suffering has shaped these lives across generations. 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. And this is always at the expense of others. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. 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. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. NONFICTIONMidnights BordersBy Suchitra VijayanMelville HousePublished May 25, 2021. Her career as a playback singer now spans Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam films and she has several hits in all these languages to her credit. Suchitra Vijayan on a journey to find a people's history of modern Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Perhaps thats their victory. Vijayan has travelled 9,000 miles over seven 7 across India's borderline remote areas and has collected many bone-chilling, painful, myth-breaking stories of the people caught in between inter-state disputes because of the lines created by colonial powers who ruled over us for . Opinion | After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJP's Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. How did you arrive at this stylistic juncture where you manage to tell the stories of these people who are radically less privileged than you without appropriating them? Ten years later, you were in Kashmir, where you 'hoped to find answers' by talking to a family that had lost a son. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister at law and the author of Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. Worse, we have been disciplined to accept injustice and inequality as given. Why dont people see the ground shifting beneath their feet? Some things are just not discussed anymore. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. The world we know is already being remade in ways we cant fathom. What are those ethical, moral, and political lines? Suchitra Vijayan - New Lines Institute They are also essentially bureaucratic, judicial, and procedural acts of terror. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. 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? You need a community of people to support you. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. 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. 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. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? It is truly the treason of the intellectuals. We could have attributed this to ignorance even a few years back; now its just silence thats deeply complicit in the Hindutva project. Again, in the India-China border, she finds a young army officer closely referring to a book that contradicts the official version of the Indo-China war of 1962, and concludes that perhaps, he recognizes that most of soldiering involved cynical subordination to ideas that no longer made sense.. That changes how you write and photograph a place. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? 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. Barrister. Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. And, in many cases, they are children of the literary, cultural, or political elite who have long been the beneficiaries of the Indian state. 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? 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. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) Her writing has appeared in The Citron Review, Dukool Magazine, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India (Spellbound edition), and others. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. I wrote the book, but those who have lived through this hell continue to live and navigate this hell. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands.