suchitra vijayan husband

Those notes were raw and immediate. 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. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. I dont think theres just one emotion that drives a writer to finish writing. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. Thanks to The New India Foundation for sending across a beautiful copy of the Midnights Borders. Rohini Menon for Feminism in India, FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation, Institutional Violence & Political Imagination, Ananya is a chaotic humanities student with a deep interest in the relationship between art and society, a writing obsession, and way too many bizarre ideas involving their camera. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. What do words like democracy, freedom, and citizenship mean? Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. 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. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. A: Writers are very strange creatures. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Pushback is such a benign word, isnt it? Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. In the middle of significant change, this fraught system cannot exist as it is. Second, there is a clear distinction between speaking against the powerful and claiming to speak on behalf of the "voiceless". One of the ways she upholds the humane in this book is through her interaction with the men in the security forces. Find him on Twitter at @AruniKashyap. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. The original vision of the book also has newspaper cuttings, and found maps. 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. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. It is here that we subsume all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberalism, liberty, and secular ideals.". Required fields are marked *. I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. I still do. One of the reasons why this book was written was to step back: to say that this violence that you and I listen to and encounter is not new to say that this violence is not new. Suchitra Vijayan complicates and expands our understanding of the South Asian American experience, urging readers to consider stories that cast dark eyes at India, a strategic ally of many Western nations. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. That changes how you write and photograph a place. This book ate into so much of my life. But eventually we need all kinds of stories and arguments to emerge from what is now considered Indian American writing. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. If it does, I have failed. Midnight's Bordersis an exceptional read, but one that may make some uncomfortable. Where India ends and Bangladesh begins is a question confused by history, family and the border pillars themselves. Panitar has a one-foot-high concrete block on the side of the mighty Ichamati river marked Border Pillar No.1. It is always Bollywood, the ascent of Priyanka Chopra, or the diasporic loneliness. Its a vicious cycle. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. For instance, a border security personnel tells her how he failed to capture a photograph of a porcupine after spending half an hour trying to fit a helmet on its head, because he is bored and lonely. 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. 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. 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. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. I think the way that news and mostly disinformation makes its way to us, we think of violence in very particular waysas disjointed. I felt the same way when I would prepare legal petitions for my clients. Once we eliminated the spectacle, we realized that the Indian public got very little information about the Pulwama attack and its aftermath. That was my starting point. 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. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. Zoya, a young female officer, is now confined to her wheelchair, and Milind, who also makes it out alive, is seen at home with drawn curtains, battling trauma. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. A lot of travel writing is still written by a particular group of people with immense privilege, and they all tend to center themselves. I think its the other way round, these communities have always been speaking, writing, documenting, teachingwe must simply listen rather than represent them in any way. 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. Its a practice. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. I have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. 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. I dont want to make this about me. Now, border security policies are linked to domestic politics. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? When the book finally came out, India was undergoing the deadly 2nd wave. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. In her book, she makes her intention clear at the very beginning, claiming that this endeavor is not to give voice to the voiceless but to critique the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty. She acknowledges that a book in its limited scope cannot really encapsulate the entirety of this journey, and it will remain more of a scrapbook, a collection of images, texts, poetry, and maps. Is that a probable solution? In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. Photograph of Suchitra Vijayan courtesy of Suchitra Vijayan. To make matters worse, between 2013 and 2019, editors of channels and publications have been sacked and replaced, primarily because of their criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? To repurpose an old sayingall infamy is now good virality. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. She responded to an ad for the post of an RJ in Radio Mirchi. 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. This is the backdrop against which we map how border practices and policies have played out in India. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. First, does my work aid the powerful? ( I hate this word, voiceless, by the way). The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. Your prose is hopeful there. At a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayans Midnights Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of Indias nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. Vijayan researches meticulously into official documents and conducts a series of interviews in an effort to uncover the murky truths behind the death of Hilal Ahmed Mir, a supposed militant killed by the military in an encounter in the disputed territory of Kashmir, or Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl who was shot when trying to cross the barbed wire at the porous India-Bangladesh border. 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. British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan on the eve of independence in August, 1947. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. 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. The book was called ``a genre-bending book of nonfictionmade By looking beyond maps to create a museum of forgotten stories, Vijayan has given voice to those who live on the fringes like Ali or Sari. Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?". Yes, men who act as petty sovereigns are everywhere. 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 . The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. 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. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Its a hard book to name, and I kept going back and forth. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. We need more such books. From the epoch of Empire to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. They both have pregnant daughters, a fact that becomes significant as the novel progresses. RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . 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. The book was called ``a genre- bending book of nonfictionmade of stories, encounters, vignettes, and photographsabout home, belonging, and displacement.`` Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Suchitra Vijayan. @suchitrav. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. An unprecedented militarisation of these spaces accompanied this. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? This is where I believe literary nonfiction becomes a powerful tool. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Second, we can no longer have certain conversationsconversations are now impossible. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? 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. 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. [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]. Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. O. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . I'mdyslexic, but have visual and episodic memory, which means I dream and relive moments. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. That capacity to be able to go away and then come back profoundly affects how you write because then you are still rooted. We removed an image just before the printing to make sure the person was protected. by Suchitra Vijayan Hardcover 1,759.00 2,023.00 You Save: 264.00 (13%) Usually dispatched in 1 to 3 weeks. We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. There is also a lot of deep-seated misogyny, casteism, and anti-Black racism in our communities that need to be addressed. We perform rituals of freedom in a right-less societywe dont ask if the rules, laws, and policies that are put in place are fair, just, right or equitable. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. 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. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. This Life Draws Attention to Life Behind Bars and the Transcendent Power of Rap, Wrestling with Reality in The Big Door Prize. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. This idea of responsibility gets obfuscated in many ways. 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.. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. I was reading a lot of Pessoa when I was in Afghanistan, so another placeholder title was 'Maps/Lines/Cartographies of Disquiet', inspired by the Book of Disquiet. J.G.P. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. I am repeating what I have said before, "Kashmir is Indias greatest moral and political failure. I find that profoundly inspiring. ). After being detained at one of the checkpoints for over two hours, I made my way to one of the villages closest to the Line of Control. 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. This was something I had to resist from the get-go. Suchitra Vijayan undertook a 9000 mile journey over seven years to India's borderlands to write Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. What is the function of seeing and documenting? In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. 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. We live in a profoundly unequal society, where every day brings news of new devastation. 2:16. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". And this is always at the expense of others. She is not alone. Thoughbordersare conventionally recognised as real or artificial lines of spatial and political demarcation, there may also be an arbitrariness to them.

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