suchitra vijayan husband

History and memory is localwhich means its almost impossible to write about India. Rumpus: I believe your book contributes to an important conversation about India we must have right now in the United States, for its own sake. I was much younger when I took on this project, so I wanted to prove those people wrong. Modi met with senior police officers and ordered them not to intervene as violence raged. Suchitra Ramadurai, known by the mononym Suchitra, is an Indian radio jockey, popular playback singer, songwriter, composer, voice artist, dubbing artist and film actress. You can find them onYouTube&Linkedin,and can also check out their websitehere. 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. It's a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition . 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. She has sung in multiple languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. These new worlds are already herethey are maps of survival, maps of resistance. Many come from immense privileges of caste, class, wealth, access, and resources. 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? RT @project_polis: Writing fiction in a dystopian world - @kiccovich in conversation with @mohammedhanif https://thepolisproject.com/listen/writing-fiction-in-a . 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. I dont have apprehensions. FII Interviews: Suchitra Vijayan Talks About Marginalisation Itembodied young Indias grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. 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. Without any official statement on the number of casualties by the Indian government, the Indian news media reported that 300 terrorists were killed, citing government sources. 1 author picked Midnight's Borders as one of their favorite books, . Firstly, when we talk about violence, we often talk about it only as communal violence, as if both communities have equal strength and power. Another name that came to my mind was 'An Outline of the Republic', only to discover Siddhartha Debs excellent book by the same name. 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 . We need more such books. She was part of a music band at PSG. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. They continue to. This income helps us keep the magazine alive. As the author notes, here, beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. A. Midnights Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building. It has taken me over a decade to get here. 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. On Feb. 14, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama in India-administered Kashmir, resulting in the death of 40 Indian officers. Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India: Vijayan Also, I am an unknown and insignificant entity. My friend Ritesh Uttamchandani said this once, the lens that elusive distance between the photographer and the photographed is often impossible to bridge. 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. 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. 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. Rumpus: In such a climate, what do you think is the responsibility of the diasporic Indian writer? Suchitra is now a singer-songwriter as well, composing music on her own and in collaboration with Singer Ranjith. Travel to States like Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in the Northeast which share borders with China and Myanmar required Inner Line Permits, BSF soldiers followed her everywhere on the West Bengal/ Bangladesh border, and in Kashmir she was summoned to meet the local inspector at Uri. She's a good friend and kindly agreed to take our City Hall wedding photos. A: I dont agree with this kind of framing, because its not that underrepresented people dont have voices. If it does, I have failed. 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. Vijayan shows a keen eye for detail as she presents these diverse lives. Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is director of research at the Polis Project. The Indian government bears some responsibility for this: Amid this brinkmanship between the two nuclear powers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not address the nation directly. And yet, the research and the history never overpowers the flow of the narrative. Along the way, we meet the men and women of TASC, dissenting students, ISIS terrorists and Pakistani military officers. But, more importantly, I wanted my readers to walk away with a sense of empathy. Its when we lose hope that we believe that we have lost everything. 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. 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 . 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. Later on she moved to Coimbatore for her MBA from PSG Institute of Management. 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. She is currently working on her first novel. FII Media Private Limited | All rights reserved, "Imagine how it would be for someone coming from a Dalit/Bahujan, Muslim, Adivasi, working class background, who wants to come into thisit is especially difficult if youre a woman coming from these backgrounds. There are instances when you and some voices in the narrative question their documentation practice. Because you are constantly thinking about the ethical universe you are bringing this child into What values do you teach this child? Vijayan: Let me start heregood writing is powerful and political. 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. 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. As I travelled, I was very aware of these inherent power differences. He was arrested based on fabricated evidence in the middle of a global pandemic, and he was denied bail and medical help. And were there any apprehensions since you began working on this book? What it means to photograph, write, report and document is an ongoing process. 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. 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. Co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, Suchitra is also the founder of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organisation. Founder & ExecDirector: @project_polis @watchthestate ; Teach @nyugallatin Writer Manhattan, NY linktr.ee/suchitravijayan Born April 14 Joined May 2008 8,013 Following 80.8K Followers Tweets & replies I dont want to make this about me. Suchitra was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the daughter of Ramadurai and Padmaja. Not mine. 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. Sometimes lost. In Midnight's Borders, Suchitra Vijayan meditates on belongingness, freedom and political implications of territorial demarcations 'The border making project is central to the capitalist and neoliberal logic,' Vijayan says. In politics we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. 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. It is the fragility of human lives that remains at the very center of the book. is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. 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 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. Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the worlds largest democracy and second most populous country. 6,253 Followers, 902 Following, 1,165 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Suchitra Vijayan (@suchitravijayan) 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. 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. The Indian State and the people of this Republic. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. The writing grew around the images and the visual memory of the encounters. Suchitra Vijayan - Amazon 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. How do you think your book contributes to the larger conversation about India? None of this helps in telling richer, more textured stories. 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. Accompanied by this globally, democracies are becoming more authoritarian and stripping people of their citizenshipreducing them to subjects, entrenching the fault lines of inequality.