ISBN 9788194879053|Hardback|261 pages|2021|Westland Context
Suchitra Vijayan's complex history, Midnight's Borders, shows how India's policies have fueled border conflicts, with devastating effects.
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Suchitra Vijayan uses precise language to explain the implications that India’s contested borders have for the region’s inhabitants. Her text begins with a historical overview, showing how the British India devolved, fracturing to become India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It demonstrates the impact of sloppily drawn, arbitrary boundaries within each region, where borders cut through villages, farms, and houses. These rendered many people “stateless,” as have interpretations of citizenship fueled by nationalism, ignorance, and hatred. Such problems, Vijayan shows, have been compounded by prejudicial policies, religion, misogyny, vengeance, and violence.
To understand this complex history, Vijayan traced India’s 9,000-mile border herself, finding its issues reflected in the people she encountered. She contrasts the Indian history she learned in school with what she discovered among people living in the contested regions and those who’ve been forced to flee. The book documents how people’s lives changed forever because of border policies.
The book is evocative when it comes to the sights and sounds of the affected communities, illuminating the stories of people who struggle to survive in border areas, and the losses that they faced at the hands of corrupt officials who decide who belongs within India’s boundaries and who doesn’t. It depicts the traumas that result from immense power imbalances in liminal spaces and profiles people who’ve migrated to find work, marry, or escape violence; many are now in prison or are no longer able to return to the places of their births or heritage.
Midnight’s Borders is timely, first-rate journalism made human; it recounts the deep personal consequences of colonialism and forced national identity.
Suchitra Vijayan is the founder and the Executive Director of The Polis Project. She is a Barrister at Law, writer, political essayist, and lecturer.
She studied Law, Political Science and International Relations, and was trained as a Barrister-at-Law and called to Bar at the Honourable Society of Inner Temple. Her work looks at theories of violence, war, and human nature. She writes about war, conflict, foreign policy, politics, literature, and photography.
She has written for GQ, Washington Post, The Telegraph, and Foreign Policy amongst other publications, and quoted in BBC, The Guardian, NBC News, NPR, and others.
As an attorney, Suchitra has previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She co-founded and was the Legal Director of Resettlement Legal Aid Project, Cairo that gave legal aid for Iraqi refugees.
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