I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. This is a profoundly alienating place for anyone without the networks of privilege and resources. They cannot be abusive or personal. Excellent interview, brave insights and critical reflections! Theyre screaming all the time, its just that we dont listen to them. Tamil Movie Articles Trisha | Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya | Tamannah | Anniyan | Aishwarya Rai", "Bigg Boss Awards for each contestant in Bigg Boss Tamil 4", Suchitra: I can sound sweet, sexy, bold or sensual, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suchitra&oldid=1141096550, Crossover episode with Bigg Boss Tamil; Fearless Award, Nominated: Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer Telugu for the song 'Nijamena' from, Nominated: SIIMA Award for Best Female Playback Singer|Best Female Playback Singer for the song 'Sir Osthara' from, This page was last edited on 23 February 2023, at 09:35. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. 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. India shares borders with a host of . It took me 8 years to write the book. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. A consistent ethical framework within the media hasnt existed for a long time. . We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. First, the escalation in the counterinsurgency war within the Kashmir Valley under which hundreds of activists were arrested and several Kashmiri civilians killed in gun battles was grievously underreported. 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. All too often, the Indian media portrays Kashmiris as terrorists or human shields, not as a community seeking self-determination. I have no formal training as a writer or a photographer, I taught myself and learnt by doing, failing and creating my own grammar. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. Suchitra Vijayan. We also need a fundamental reframing of language. Some of the oldest resistances in our nation are those communities who have been fighting for their own homes from militarisation who seek to exploit their mineral rich home land for mining. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. suchitrav. Perhaps thats their victory. What changeshave youobserved in the way you treat your subject after finishing your journey and book? She was part of a music band at PSG. This means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. Early on, I was very careful to acknowledge this. Then my agent said, Suchitra, you know, I think youre hiding behind your academic language. She is the founder and executive director of The Polis Project, and the author of. Take a look at theseevents: The vast infrastructure of detention centers being built in Assam and outside; a politician from a ruling party incites violence by saying, goli maaro saalon ko, and remains free; a minister, a Harvard educated technocrat, garlands and celebrates men for the grave crime of lynching; Dr Teltumbde and other BK 16 [the 16 arrests made in the Bhima Koregaon case] political prisoners remain incarcerated with little, no or manufactured evidence for being dissenting subjects; and a standup comic is arrested for the crime of existing as a Muslim. This book ate into so much of my life. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? 4 reviews of Suchitra Vijayan Photography "Huge fan of Suchitra Vijayan Photography! Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. We need more writers from Indias Northeast, Kashmir, Indigenous, Dalit, and Muslim communities to tell stories that help complete the canvas of narratives about India. Like you train for a marathon, you train to be hopeful everyday. Chopra cleverly uses womens empowerment, diversity, and the immigrant story as a facade to parrot and promote deeply problematic ideologies, takes, and stances. The photographs add another dimension to the book, and could have been used more. [1] Career [ edit] We play an ever more important role in these times when there is a fascist authoritarian regime in India and a deeply racist police state in the US. Examining My Caste And Its History Is Eye-Opening: A Personal Essay On Casteism And Ancestry, The History Of The Colonial State And The Unmaking Of The Tawaif, Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar, These Are The 15 Women Who Helped Draft The Indian Constitution, Gender Roles And Stereotyping In To Kill A Mockingbird, A Brief Summary Of The Second Wave Of Feminism, A Brief Summary Of The First Wave Of Feminism, Kamala Das The Mother Of Modern Indian English Poetry | #IndianWomenInHistory, A Brief Summary Of The Third Wave Of Feminism, The Life And Times Of Dnyanjyoti Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule | #IndianWomenInHistory, FII Interviews: Charlotte Munch Bengtsen Talks About Women In Filmmaking, FII Interviews: Drag King And Influencer Mx. 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. Subscribe here. We see that more clearly when you decide against photographing children at the India-Bangladesh border. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. 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. 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. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? I have never lived under military occupation, curfew, or a looming threat of violence. Do you think the future is borderless? I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. 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. Rumpus: How hard was it to write nonfiction about such a violent contemporary history? 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. As a Bookshop affiliate, The Rumpus earns a percentage from qualifying purchases. The entire episode is emblematic of a broader trend in Indian media. Also read: Book Review: Looking Through Dalit Sahitya And Ambedkar. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and is the author of The House With a Thousand Stories, His Fathers Disease, and There Is No Good Time for Bad News. But who gets to speak for so many of us? So lets be very clear that Indias intellectual literary landscape is deeply problematic, feudal, and alienating," says Suchitra Vijayan to FII, Featured Image Source: Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Who is expendable, and the manufacturing of rightlessness to render people expendable. A place to read, on the Internet. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. I have no control over what comes next. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. Respond to our political present. In retaliation, the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp in Balakot in Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The events in Hathras did not happen at the border; neither did the murder and gang rape of two teenage girls in the Katra village of Budaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. Suchitra Vijayan. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. 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. That, perhaps, is the only way to avoid further destruction in the region. 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. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Also read: Whose Stories Are Told In Indian History? He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. I have two tests. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. We dont document violence against the privileged like we would report violence against those without power. 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. These are edited excerpts from the interview: 'Midnight' seems to be a metaphor for multiple things both freeing and frightening. Rumpus: Were you trying to write a hybrid-genre book? Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. The post-Cold War and 90s rhetoric of a borderless world that accompanied globalisation also kick-started massive border fencing projects in India. Then you sit in a room with a mother telling you that she has no idea what happened to her son and has no way of knowing if hes ever coming back. The first true peoples history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders. 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. India has consistently warred against its own citizens; this book is about some of these wars. Vijayan reserves her own impressions for later, and allows us to know these people intimately. It took a long time to get the voice right. She is currently working on her first novel. How did writing this book affect you? It is also the site of the worlds biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its peopleespecially those living in disputed border regions. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. What do you think the future holds? 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? If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. Rumpus: Can we please talk about Priyanka Chopra, and how her rise is seen as a marker of brown achievement? Speculation and conjecture were repeated ad infinitum, and several journalists even took to Twitter to encourage the Indian army. Is that a probable solution? 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.. In Nellie (Assam) too, where over 3,000 Muslims were killed in 1983, people stared at Vijayan in confusion, no one comes here anymore, she was told. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. I find that profoundly inspiring. In an early chapter of the book, you talk about how new worlds are created by the people at Indias borders. Q: Since publishing the book last year, what reflections have you hadgiven that its relevance is increasingly ascertained by 2022s interpersonal and geopolitical violence? One of the reasons I kept writing was of course all the people I met: their love and time and generosity. 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. What makes these lives so vivid is how Vijayan contextualizes them by placing them in the bigger picture of history. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. The latter is an act of violence against people whose voice you are appropriating. Vijayan: Most Indian American writers, especially many of them who occupy the broad spectrum of literary to punditry, come from immense privilege of caste and class. The interview has been paraphrased and condensed for clarity, at the interviewers discretion. 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. Categories. 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. So we might never know the true extent of this loss. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. 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. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. These instances are also about border practices because modern states, especially liberal democracies, expend immense energy in creating and maintaining identity categories: who belongs, and where. She has a sister named, Sunitha. Suchitra is a sought-after performer at corporate and other such stage shows. 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. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. 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. There is no denying that the American media landscape is deeply racist, and while the past few years have seen more brown people take center stage, its nowhere close to where we need to be. She lives in New York. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. I want to flag two essays where I engage with this in an in-depth manner, Disaster Ruins Everything, on my work in Haiti, and what it means to photograph disaster, especially when it is Brown and Black bodies. How do you protect this child? J.G.P. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. 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 Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Yes, Chopra does take a huge share of attention, but the real danger is how people like her whitewash Hindutva, and now increasingly co-opt the language of Hinduphobia to counter any critique of Hindutva. 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. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Chopra is popular because she satisfies a certain need for validationthe trope of brown representation where the mere act of being represented is seen as a singular virtue worth applauding. 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. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. Indian Foreign Secretary V.K. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. The act of recording and documenting cannot be divorced from the inherent question of power. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' How do you think this inspiration from a variety of genres allowed you to tell underrepresented stories? Suchitras account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. These are no longer contradictory; instead, even criticism can be converted to views. ", "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.". 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'. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. 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. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. 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. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. If you want to support the work that goes behind publishing high-quality feminist media content, please consider becoming a FII member. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. No one would put themselves through the agony and pain of writing. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. Q: What was your goal with writing the book in the beginning and how did it change and drive you throughout those 8 years? Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. 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 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. The third thing is: were going back to relitigating everything. You will see very little critical commentary or public positions on Hindutva, its corrosive role in India, or how RSS works here in the USfunding and now interfering in US elections. They are arriving from various cities and people I have never met. 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. 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. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. Abrogation Of Article 370 Jammu And Kashmir Statehood, BSF foils another Pakistan plot, shoots down drone in Punjab's Amritsar, Light on weight, heavy on damage: India will be able to hit deep inside Pakistan with THIS ultralightweight howitzer, Put issues related to border in 'proper place', work for its early normalisation: Chinese FM Qin to Jaishankar, In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations. The emotional cost is something else altogether. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. With the phone armed with a camera, everyone is a photographer; we are all witnesses. The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Supreme Court forms expert panel to probe any regulatory failure on Adani issue, India makes renewed push for consensus at G20 Foreign Ministers meeting, Hindenburg Research report on Adani Group | Supreme Court verdict on expert committee on March 2, High debt on Vedanta books puts investors on tenterhooks, Employees Provident Fund: How to activate UAN online, 1947: Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act passed, RMA 0-1 FCB, El Clasico highlights: Barcelona leads on aggregate after beating Real Madrid courtesy of a Militao own goal. In India, that arbitrariness can be seen in how differently we perceive landboundaries with multiple sovereign nations. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love.