Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. 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. Qin took charge as Chinese foreign minister in December, succeeding Wang Yi. Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. You need to write what you seethats why you started this project.. We once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. She also embodies the upwardly mobile, privileged sections of the diaspora. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. Why the Modi government lies. The government, of course, denies this. Why do you think India has gotten away with this so far? 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? 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. Many TV newsrooms were transformed into caricatures of military command centers, with anchors assessing military technology and strategy (sometimes incorrectly). She perfectly captured the happiness and the intimacy of the occasion, the warmth of all the people present, and the splendor of the venue. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. Vijayan is no stranger to stories of violence. History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. 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. When fencing began, he became trapped in a no-mans land, his marriage to a girl from Bangladesh ended with each being stranded on either side and he never got out of the cycle of debt and struggle, finally losing the ability to dream. Can you write about loss without living? Aruni Kashyap writes in English, and his native language Assamese. 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. Apart from his long-suffering wife, no one else in the family knows that he is a spy. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories. Suchitra Vijayan, Newspapers in a Kashmiri home In August 2014 I travelled to the border town of Uri while researching my upcoming book, Borderlands. A literary community. In addition, she is an award- winning photographer, the founder, and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. Keywords: LTTE love jihad Beef politics Hindu Nationalism Kashmir The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for humanising terrorists. MacAdam reviews Suchitra Vijayan's book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India Read More. 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. She lives in New York. 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. There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. How do you think the media ought to responsibly report on peoples lives and experiences? Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. I have no control over what comes next. How "The Family Man" champions the carceral security state. by Suchitra Vijayan Hardcover 1,759.00 2,023.00 You Save: 264.00 (13%) Usually dispatched in 1 to 3 weeks. A: I lost friends, saw my father go through a transplant, and I gave birth. 'Suchitra's account of her journeys across the undefinable and ever-shifting borders between India and its neighbours is gripping, frightening, faithful and beautiful. It seems that they have a different eye for these women, who they describe as cunning, deceitful, and in some cases, prostitutes'. 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. Categories. It definitely doesnt help when trying to hold a powerful state accountable. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. Its an immense privilege to be able to write and be published. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. And this is always at the expense of others. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. 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. 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'. One feedback I often got was that I had to put more of myself in this book. Suchitra Vijayan is the executive director of the Polis Project. [3], She started singing after a few years as RJ. 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. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. Also, we shouldn't forget that the border making project is central to capitalist and neoliberal logic. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. 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 . Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Now, along with the medias legitimization of an ideology that promotes violence including riots and lynchings its performance after Pulwama leaves severe doubts as to whether it is engaged in journalism or the propagation of Hindu majoritarianism. Why is this particular time of the day intrinsic to the book? Vijayan: Its a very generous reading, and thanks for that. Who gets to travel, tell stories, and, more importantly, publish them are all deeply connected to questions of access, resources, and privilege. Perhaps that offers some protection? So here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth, but also perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power. Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. 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. These are stories of massive human rights violations committed by the Indian state in the countrys margins. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. 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. 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. Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. But it needs to do more for peace. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. 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. The people in the text fear statelessness, unknown violence, and being forgotten. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades.
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