suchitra vijayan husband

What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and . There are so many nonfiction books about India published yearly but few are so important and subversive. The constant making and remaking of who is a citizen, who is not, is accompanied by a profoundly dehumanising process. March 06, 2021 04:50 pm | Updated March 07, 2021 08:05 am IST. 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. Even those among us who will speak of BLM will not openly challenge Hindutva or the RSS. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Clubs (poetry, prose, or both) and Letters in the Mail from authors (for adults and kids). I came with my privileges, also lets not forget prejudices. Vijayan: I would say I am hopeful. " India's intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. 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. Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitrav) / Twitter Follow Suchitra Vijayan @suchitrav Author: Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India. Suchitra Vijayan. I find that profoundly inspiring. To them he is a man who has settled into a job that has no future. 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. 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. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. Who gets to shape these stories, what stories are chosen, what stories then are exiled? More Buying Choices 1,732.00 (16 Used & New offers) Audible Audiobook 0.00 Free with Audible trial 586.00 ( 9 ) Reports also identified different people as the supposed masterminds of the Pulwama attack at various points without clear sourcing. Nonfiction, Travel, Fiction Member Since February 2021 edit data Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Could you comment on how much our present border security policies have changed in the last few years? J.G.P. . 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 originally going to be a photographic body of work, which changed when I started writing. In 1971, East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. 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. . 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). If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. Panitars division is as cruel as it is arbitrary: here, the houses on either side of one dusty lane occupy two neighbouring countries. 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. I had to cut those out, as my editor felt this might not work. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. We are consuming subjects in a surveillance economy, not citizens. The failure to forget affects how I use images, and texts; my photographic practice and also how I put everything together. Second, Indias transformation into a nuclear state and the Kargil War is another critical moment of change. A literary community. I believe it can teach us to ask these questions again. I particularly loved the fact that all our couple shots were very natural and came out truly . Good, honest and non-polemical writing has always forced us to confront the lies we tell ourselves. The pandemic showed us that crises and recurrent disasters that annihilate our lives are here to stay. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country weve long been missing. 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. I had to write and rewrite this book so many times. Our borders had become a spectacle, and we the cheering mob, she says, as she calls for purging hatred for the sake of posterity. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? Fear seems to be a constant motif in the book we see versions and types of it. The Rumpus: It is shocking how unaware the world is about the violence the Indian government has committed since independence on its border citizens. Second, there were times when I ran out of money, when some said that such a book would not be published, when some declared that such a book could not be written. "Fighting for justice and human rights in India is a long and lonely battle" Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri (from 2019) Midnights Borders, a work of narrative reportage, is the fruit of this journey. These may not be perfect worlds or even equal worlds, but they strive to be. 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. First, does my work aid the powerful? 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. A t a time when right-wing nationalism is crescendoing in India and across the world, Suchitra Vijayan's Midnight's Borders raises pertinent questions about the very foundations of India's nationalism the cartography of South Asian nation-states defined by arbitrary lines drawn hastily by the British colonial administration. 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. But the inclination to still treat India as a democracy remains. 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. The nation-state and its ruling class view borders as very different from the people who inhabit these liminal spaces or communities that have been affected by border making and policing practices. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness we are record keepers, unwitting spies, and voyeurs. Having been trained in law, Suchitra Vijayan initially worked at the United Nations war tribunals in Yugoslavia. Rumpus: Why do you think the ever-growing canon of Indian American literature has barely tried to engage with these conversations through their stories? 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. The taxi driver who describes the Egyptian revolution in five minutes to an American columnist (who speaks no Arabic) is sadly where the genre is today. This language drums the idea of the fundamental importance of justice, and such language is inalienable: it can easily be defined and empathetically understood. Vijayan undertakes a seven-year long, 9,000-mile . 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. 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. The black and white pictures accompanying the chapters add a thousand words more. 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. Empathy is taught by our communities; we are brought up with it. 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. Book reviews and author interviews with a Southern focus. When Vijayan meets him, he is inside his home with all the windows closed and sealed to snuff out light. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. 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. By Suchitra Vijayan, Why should I read it? What connects these messages is deep empathy and a willingness to engage with the books stories, ideas, and arguments. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. Also, hope is a discipline. We're back with our flagship podcast 'Intersectional FeminismDesi Style!' We still argue if something should be a massacre, a pogrom, or a riot. Vijayan: A writers responsibility above all is to speak the truth and make sense of our social worlds. Professor Nandita Sharmas work is an excellent way to engage with this history. Many of the stories didnt make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) Gokhale claimed that it struck the biggest camp and that a large number of terrorists were killed. In Assam, Vijayan met people devastated by the National Register of Citizens process, with names of long-time residents missing from the final list, and in Kashmir she spent time with a family mourning the loss of their son in an encounter. This media blitzkrieg resulted in the erasure of two important political trends. Suchitra is a BSc graduate from Mar Ivanios College (Trivandrum). Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. He drops and picks up his kids from school, pines for his old job and is concerned about the newly-formed government in Pakistanall the while trying to salvage his crumbling marriage. 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. You've mentioned in the text that you've spent your entire adult life thinking about state violence and justice because of a troubling incident in 1994 when your father was attacked. Siaan On Being Queer And Being Online, FII Interviews: Journalist Meena Kotwal On Minority Politics, Journalism Today And The Caste Divide. Copyright 2023, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. We believe that literature builds communityand if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Includes previously unreleased investigation under #JackStraw. 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. 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. 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. Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. In Midnight's Borders, barrister, political analyst, and writer Suchitra Vijayan documentsmany such telling accounts of lives both growing and barely getting by alongIndian borderlands. Respond to our political present. More importantly, reporters need to engage with what it means to administer what has been called the worlds most militarized zone. Only then can the country answer a more fundamental question: Just what should be done to create conditions that allow Kashmiris to choose their destiny? Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Suchitra Vijayan is an American writer, essayist, activist, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. Ali lived right on the edge of the India-Bangladesh border. 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. Even the diasporic experience is often told through this limited lens, without taking into account how diverse the immigrant experience in this country is. Second, border policies are about "performance and articulations of citizenship". We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. 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'. The stories were a way to understand how people struggled and survived. Midnights Borders is part investigation, part meditation on the lines drawn on land or water that separate India from its neighbours. 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. Especially when you can be charged with sedition for a tweet or arrested for the crime of committing comedy while being Muslim. I can see small cracks beginning to appear. My job was to make sure that their voices were centered. 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. In these circumstances, the lives of people inhabiting the sketchy borderlands has become all the more vulnerable, and fragile. 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. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. No one can write a book alone. 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. Vijayan creates a constellation of micro-histories of people who have lived through the violence that India has committed in its borderlandsinjustice that has irrigated the glamour and prosperity we witness in what some of us in those borderlands call mainland India. Vijayan, a barrister by profession, is a founding director of Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization in New York. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. What matters is that the book exists. We are all complicit in upholding and maintaining this fear. Although Vijayan critiques the state and its complicity in violence and erasure of lives, she refrains from villainizing the men who serve the state. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Sometimes lost. She never did like my then-husband, which makes her a better judge of character than I was. Rumpus: What do you think is the value of well-crafted literary nonfiction in sustaining conversations about equality and justice? Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality. Indias intellectual, journalistic, and literary landscape is profoundly problematic and alienating. Part of this learning was also why photographer Asim Rafiqui and I created the free UN/DO Photography workshops to think about image-making in relationship to power. This also decides who gets access, awards and accolades. Through these real histories of the people, she gives readers another perspective on old wounds like Partition and new divisionary tactics like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. What is the emotional and artistic cost that one pays as a writer while crafting these narratives? After Pulwama, the Indian media proves it is the BJPs propaganda machine, Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates, Fox News bosses scolded reporters who challenged false election claims, To fight defamation suit, Fox News cites election conspiracy theories. Copyright 2023. 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. In Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India, from one dangerous conflict zone to another, she spoke with people, ate with them, and listened to their stories. In an interview with Firstpost,Vijayan talks about her book, the militarisation of borders, ethno-nationalism, and the politics of documentation. If you think about communities in resistance to immense violations, theyre all interconnected to climate justice. As a spy working for TASC, Srikant Tiwari, played by Manoj Bajpayee, has to juggle being an underpaid government employee as well as an absent husband and a perpetually late and distracted father. Finally, Indias current transformation, the aggressive posturing of an aspiring ethno-nationalist state, will have dire consequences for the people and the region. Is secularism a good thing? This is such an insidious conversation to have; this was even before Adani bought it. I havent spoken or celebrated with my friends in Kashmir or Assam. Atmany points in Midnight's Borders, we see several men in positions of power view the women, who cross over from the 'other' side, as violable. How did you respond to that environment being in an extremely challenging position yourself? I dont want to make this about me. And what does this mean for on-ground communities, governments, armed forces, and other institutional stakeholders? O. 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. 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. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. Her writing and award-winning photography culminated in Midnights Borders: A Peoples History of Modern India, which was recently shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF book prize. Invariably its the writer who is the protagonist. Author In Focus, Celebration, The Literary Journal. 582.1K views. I had a very stable home to come back to. Part-time Faculty suchitra@thepolisproject.com. We have already chosen silence and obfuscation even before the pushback has arrived. Vijayan: The photographs were the heart of this project. So I dont know if it was empathy so much as just building a relationship with people. We once asked these questions, even if there were no clear answers or consensus. Similarly, motherhood changed me; it radicalised me. Also, a book is an act of community; it has many midwives. 42, Moss Rose Heights, M.M Ali road, WASA Circle, Lalkhan Bazar, Chittogong 4000. Q: As you wrote this book, you dont hesitate to meditate on how your personal life bidirectionally impacted the book. 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. 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. Lets start with a very simple statement that everyone can agree on: the way were living right now cannot continue. Parts of Pakistan have already been consumed by the water. The two press briefings by the foreign secretary and Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson entertained no questions. I was also trying to tell these stories from a repertoire of skills I had, and some I acquired. Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. The acts of writing, documenting, photographing, and archiving carry privileges of caste and class. Listen to Season 3 on Apple, Spotify and Google podcasts. Acted as the General Manager for a day and motivated employees to work for the same purpose to reinforce team . Her distinct and bold voice made her very popular with the younger crowd. Are you expecting any pushback at all? Growing up I was surrounded by people who emphasised the community over anything else. There are enough stories of people parachuting into communities to do human interest stories.. In terms of violence, there is also this tendency to photograph and display the bodies of marginalised communities when they experience violence. A: This is a very loaded question. Instead, she shows the absurdity of the army apparatus that strives to comply with the narrative of patriotism. [8] On 7 March 2017, she applied for divorce. 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. Rumpus: The book utilizes more than one medium: photography, narrative nonfiction, journalism. Chopra has long been neoliberalisms reluctant feminist, hawking giving a voice and sisterhood while silencing those who question her. Suchitra Vijayanis a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. I set out not to give voice to the voiceless, my aim was to put an ear to the ground and listen. I kept detailed audio notes that I recorded each night when I traveled. She is not alone. 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. 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. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. So the first reflection is this idea of where we are right now: as people, as a society, as a community. In the same chapter of the book, Kamal says, "If I am an Indian, then why am I afraid?" 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. Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me, Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India, FUNNY WOMEN: Excerpts from George Eliots, Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by John A. Nieves, RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: WHY I WRITE LOVE POETRY IN A BURNING WORLD by Katie Farris, The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Can any of theTIMEsubscribers who loved that cover tell us now whats happening in South Sudan today? Lets take Indias English language media, cultural-artistic elite, and publishing. Nine years ago, she began documenting stories from her travels along the borders of India. It is necessary to speak truth to power through our art. I fear we are losing that cosmopolitanism of small places. 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. 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.

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