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Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India
A Booklist "Top 10 History Book of 2022"
The first true people's history of modern India, told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world's biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people--especially those living in disputed border regions.Suchitra Vijayan traveled India's vast land border to explore how these populations live, and document how even places just few miles apart can feel like entirely different countries. In this stunning work of narrative reportage--featuring over 40 original photographs--we hear from those whose stories are never from children playing a cricket match in no-man's-land, to an elderly man living in complete darkness after sealing off his home from the floodlit border; from a woman who fought to keep a military bunker off of her land, to those living abroad who can no longer find their family history in India.With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan brings us face to face with the brutal legacy of colonialism, state violence, and government corruption. The result is a gripping, urgent dispatch from a modern India in crisis, and the full and vivid portrait of the country we've long been missing.
330 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 13, 2020
82 people are currently reading
1623 people want to read
About the author
Suchitra Vijayan
3 books46 followersSuchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. 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 Iraqi refugees. She is an award-winning photographer, the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. She lives in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews
May 7, 2021
Borders are ubiquitous. From the fence or wall that separates your home from your neighbour’s to the fences in the Rajasthan border that could be seen from the moon, one cannot escape boundaries in life. Like death, disease, war, poverty and such unsavoury things in life, borders too exist. Every border is arbitrary and irrational. But that does not make them unnecessary. India, as we know it now, came into existence as a political entity in 1947. When the colonisers left, they left a bruised land, drenched in the partition's blood and gore. But Radcliffe Line was not the only line that redrew the borders and destiny of the subcontinent. Over five hundred princely kingdoms got sucked into the Indian Republic after independently gaining independence from the British. Many parts of the country that had rarely shared a common political history or borders with each other from the dawn of history, like Travancore or Baroda, became part of the Indian union. Seventy-four years later, we can see that almost all these princely kingdoms that merged with the union of India have coexisted peacefully under one constitution. The exceptions to this rule are the few states bordering Pakistan, China or Bangladesh.
Midnight’s Borders deals with stories of individuals living near these borders. All of them are about the sufferings of people on the Indian side, except one story from the Afghanistan – Pakistan border. The stories are meticulously collected and detailed, and the language is precise and evocative. If the history of pre-second war Europe where hyper-nationalistic narratives led to pogroms and a world war is an indication, India too has a reason to worry about the rising shrillness of her right wing hyper-nationalism. The book is perhaps an attempt to take on such toxic nationalism, but the author falters by going to the opposite extreme.
Sample this from the introduction. Vijayan narrates the brutality of Dogra rulers of Kashmir in the eighteenth century. She writes about the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Jammu by the Dogra King. As per Vijayan, it was in response to this religious persecution of Muslims by a Hindu king that the Pathan frontier tribesmen marched to Srinagar. In the next paragraph, she says, 'Pakistan is **accused** of using this strategy by deploying non-state actors widely in Kashmir.' Please observe the term 'accused of.' As one can expect from the tone set in the book's introduction, there is no word about the atrocities committed by the well documented Pathan invasion on Kashmiris before Indian forces repelled them. The Kashmiri Pandit massacre or their fleeing of the valley three decades later finds even a mention anywhere in the book.
No one can or should normalise the possible human rights violations that happen in a conflict zone. There is no denying that there would be innocents caught in a crossfire on either side of the border, belonging to different ethnicities or religions. Why such areas and borders remain a conflict zone while the five hundred odd kingdoms, whose borders also arbitrarily changed after their integration to the Indian union, remain peaceful is a question one needs to ask while reading the book.
Suchitra Vijayan does not mince words while pouring out her anguish against Indian forces or the government in power. The stories of people in the margins that she portrays are told poignantly, and it can move anyone with a conscience. But again, by amplifying only one side, she reduces what could have been a striking piece of journalism to mere propaganda. The book puts 'freedom fighters' in quotes while talking about Jallianwala Bagh martyrs. And it concludes with hope about the Azadi-Azadi chants that reverberates spontaneously across the nation (as per the author) against an elected government of a democratic country. One would wonder what would happen if we opened all our borders without restrictions and disband the 'oppressive' military. Would it result in a utopia where Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese and Afghanis would live as loving siblings? Or would the new “Azadi’ mean living in a Sharia or a communist state? If you think the answer is the former, this book is apt for you. If not, then perhaps we should thank the borders and the men who stand guard there, protecting our freedom and right to read and hear diverse opinions, including this one, as guaranteed by the constitution of our democratic, secular, socialist republic.
Midnight’s Borders deals with stories of individuals living near these borders. All of them are about the sufferings of people on the Indian side, except one story from the Afghanistan – Pakistan border. The stories are meticulously collected and detailed, and the language is precise and evocative. If the history of pre-second war Europe where hyper-nationalistic narratives led to pogroms and a world war is an indication, India too has a reason to worry about the rising shrillness of her right wing hyper-nationalism. The book is perhaps an attempt to take on such toxic nationalism, but the author falters by going to the opposite extreme.
Sample this from the introduction. Vijayan narrates the brutality of Dogra rulers of Kashmir in the eighteenth century. She writes about the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Jammu by the Dogra King. As per Vijayan, it was in response to this religious persecution of Muslims by a Hindu king that the Pathan frontier tribesmen marched to Srinagar. In the next paragraph, she says, 'Pakistan is **accused** of using this strategy by deploying non-state actors widely in Kashmir.' Please observe the term 'accused of.' As one can expect from the tone set in the book's introduction, there is no word about the atrocities committed by the well documented Pathan invasion on Kashmiris before Indian forces repelled them. The Kashmiri Pandit massacre or their fleeing of the valley three decades later finds even a mention anywhere in the book.
No one can or should normalise the possible human rights violations that happen in a conflict zone. There is no denying that there would be innocents caught in a crossfire on either side of the border, belonging to different ethnicities or religions. Why such areas and borders remain a conflict zone while the five hundred odd kingdoms, whose borders also arbitrarily changed after their integration to the Indian union, remain peaceful is a question one needs to ask while reading the book.
Suchitra Vijayan does not mince words while pouring out her anguish against Indian forces or the government in power. The stories of people in the margins that she portrays are told poignantly, and it can move anyone with a conscience. But again, by amplifying only one side, she reduces what could have been a striking piece of journalism to mere propaganda. The book puts 'freedom fighters' in quotes while talking about Jallianwala Bagh martyrs. And it concludes with hope about the Azadi-Azadi chants that reverberates spontaneously across the nation (as per the author) against an elected government of a democratic country. One would wonder what would happen if we opened all our borders without restrictions and disband the 'oppressive' military. Would it result in a utopia where Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese and Afghanis would live as loving siblings? Or would the new “Azadi’ mean living in a Sharia or a communist state? If you think the answer is the former, this book is apt for you. If not, then perhaps we should thank the borders and the men who stand guard there, protecting our freedom and right to read and hear diverse opinions, including this one, as guaranteed by the constitution of our democratic, secular, socialist republic.
August 11, 2021
There is Jules Verne’s 1872 classic ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ in which the London socialite Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days to win a wager with his friends. The duo, along with a woman they rescue in India from widow-burning sati ritual who would later become Fogg’s wife, cross the nations without the bother of any documents or personal papers which is the current norm. National borders have become solidified and imporous in the intervening 150 years since the publication of that book. There are people supports the restrictions on human movement because of the order and control a state can exert over the outsiders. Then there are the freedom lovers who detest the requirement of documentary verification to move across the planet earth which is in fact the shared home of the entire humanity. Then there are some who enjoy all the benefits the nation state confers on its citizens, but at the same time make self-righteous comments on the national borders as artificially separating groups of people. This book belongs to the third category. This is the record of a 9000-mile journey along India’s borders to meet the people who inhabit the margins of the state and ‘to study the human toll of decades of aggressive, territorial nationalism’. This is not a straightforward chronology of travel. It is a series of encounters in towns, cities and abandoned ruins and comes up with a silly indictment of the Indian Republic, which the author presumes has no right to protect its borders against unauthorized entry of outsiders. It also seems to be a made-to-order narrative western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) want to hear. Suchitra Vijayan was born and brought up in Chennai and is now settled in the US as a writer.
What is plainly visible in the core concept and organisation of the narrative is the trivialization of history. Suchitra stands aloof and impervious to its lessons. This is evident in her ‘imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation states’ (p.122). Even a cursory glance at history shows that the demand to divide India into two nation states and thereby to erect a boundary where none existed before came from the proponents of Pakistan. It was the Muslim League who demanded partition and followed it up with blood-curdling atrocities like murder, rape, arson and pillage in Calcutta, Noakhali and numerous other places in Pakistan. She also acts blind to the history of illegal immigration or planned demographic deluge of Assam. In 1947, the Assamese district of Sylhet was surprisingly found to be a Muslim-majority region due to unchecked migration that lasted for decades. Consequently, Sylhet was separated from India and given away to Pakistan. The author wants India to open up her borders and subsequently get drowned in the flood of often violent illegal migration. The book also proposes false pretexts such as the claim that ‘to govern India, the British introduced separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, which further stoked Hindu-Muslim violence’ (p.9). This is either a deliberate falsehood or the height of historical ignorance. Separate electorates were demanded and snatched away by the Muslims in their bid to secure sufficient number of seats for themselves in an electorate where the Hindus otherwise commanded a significant majority. Likewise, we don’t come across any serious research in the preparation of this book. The shallow findings point to a pleasure trip to the border with a camera on the shoulder. She just copies the fanciful tales told to her by interested parties without displaying any insight or critical assessment.
The author complains that borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. This fails to take an important idea into consideration. In all the corners she travelled in India, the fence was erected to keep the outsiders out, rather than keeping the insiders in, like the Berlin Wall did. This makes the assertion inoperative as that does not restrict anybody’s freedom. It is precisely due to the strict border controls that the 2008 Mumbai attackers, who indiscriminately shot dead 166 innocent people, had to take the circuitous route through the sea to reach India. Unfortunately, the author has interviewed only those people who have illegally entered India or who are suspected to be so. After this false step, she escalates the issue to international level and equates the Kashmir issue to Palestine – the typical Pakistani point of view – saying that what is happening at both the places are the same (p.24). What astounds the readers is the book’s romanticizing of jihadi fighters, embellishing their crooked stories of violent heroism and reproducing their photographs with lethal assault rifles strewn over the chest.
Suchitra displays a vehement hatred towards India, which is her home country. Even though she stays in New York apparently on a permanent basis, she is still an Indian. This hatred is so intense that she appears to be foaming in the mouth at the intensity of the feeling and the rush of invective. She repeatedly refers to Kashmir as Indian-occupied, following the Pakistani rhetoric. She accuses Indians as treating most of the natives in Arunachal border areas as savages to be tamed. Indians are said to be placing images and idols of Hindu gods and goddesses in ruined temples in border areas, as if that is a crime! Also, the statement that India ‘doesn’t issue IDs to its citizens but do so for cattle’ is an outright lie while the cattle ID seem to be taken from trolls in social media. The author finds the practice of erecting shrines to soldiers fallen in battle, offensive as they ‘protect nationalistic fantasy with no historical basis’. Suchitra writes down the names of dead soldiers of the World War from the War Cemetery at Kohima, Nagaland. Not even one Indian is mentioned, while two from present-day Pakistan is listed. But when she quotes a Naga separatist telling her that they used to name their dogs after Indian soldiers, they come out in a perfect desi flavour – Mishra, Natarajan, Singh and Mukesh!
This book proves that the author is not even a liberal who ought to oppose authoritative regimes. Even if the Indian state is accepted as authoritative for argument’s sake, China is infinitely more so. But the author treats China with kid gloves, never uttering a harsh word against them. Kashmir is claimed to be Indian-occupied, but the same logic is not extended to Tibet which should be called Chinese-occupied. Instead, it is the ‘Chinese province of Tibet’ (p.77). She quotes one Karunakar Gupta of London who had ‘found’ forged Aitchison treaties that clinch the argument in favour of China’s claim over Tibet. The 1962 war is said to be caused by ‘India’s suppression of facts, distortion of history, possible alterations of maps and withholding of official documents related to the borders’. She exalts an Indian PoW’s book on the military defeat against China in 1962 while remaining tightlipped on India’s successful intervention in Bangladesh in 1971 and its liberation. It is such tactical omissions and misrepresentations that make the readers doubtful about the author’s real intent and sources of financing for this book.
What is truly hilarious is the author’s utter ignorance of India’s judicial system. Judges in courts are said to be working under contract employment who receive better assessments if they declared more people guilty (p.135). They are accused not to be following rules of evidence, acting without supervision and without any challenge to their authority. Rules are also arbitrary which can be bent at a judge’s disposal. At the same time, we also read about ‘destitute’ intruders who are powerful enough to appeal in the Supreme Court against unfavourable verdicts of lower courts, meeting the hefty fees of lawyers who practice in the apex court. The author is naïve and gullible as to swallow their concocted stories lock stock and barrel. Suchitra narrates a personal anecdote which naturally makes her antagonistic to Indian judiciary. Her father was once assaulted by hired goons of a Tamil politician, nearly killing him. After twelve years of legal wrangling, the trial court acquitted all of them for want of evidence. Is that the reason why she is a staunch anti-Indian? Readers are left to wallow in guess work on this point.
Quite expectably, a considerable portion of the text is reserved to flay the ruling nationalist dispensation of India for their avowed aim to foster national coherence. India is claimed to be transforming into a violent, xenophobic Hindu state waging war against its Constitution and so many of its people. This is the usual political rhetoric heard since the current coalition came to power in the 2014 elections. The book attempts a selective picking up of atrocities that put the government at a disadvantage. Local cow protection gangs are claimed to be operating under the command of the prime minister. The author’s partiality is best exposed by her clever but false implications that only the Muslims get killed in religious riots. It provides a provocative, one-sided narrative of the 2020 Delhi riots too. The most outrageous assertion is that the Indian economy has failed and thousands are fleeing the country to seek political asylum in the US. The author does not mention whether she is speaking this from personal experience!
Suchitra’s making fun of the sacrifice of 21 soldiers’ lives in the 1971 Pakistan war while recapturing territory in Rajasthan is simply ungrateful and mean. This is mocked as ‘reclaiming a transitory sand dune’. Here also, we distinctly hear echoes of Pakistani propaganda. All these canards are being spread while remaining under the protective shield of the Indian army and paramilitary detachments. She stayed at their guest houses, ate their meals, and travelled to the border in army vehicles with armed guard. Sometimes, the guards clear away interlopers to ensure a decent photo op for the author. In return, she strikes up a conversation with lonely and bored soldiers and reminds them of India’s defeat in the 1962 war or how their home state is being oppressed by the central government in Delhi.
This book is a waste of time as not much research has gone into writing it which I suspect to be funded by anti-India agencies. The book is not recommended
What is plainly visible in the core concept and organisation of the narrative is the trivialization of history. Suchitra stands aloof and impervious to its lessons. This is evident in her ‘imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation states’ (p.122). Even a cursory glance at history shows that the demand to divide India into two nation states and thereby to erect a boundary where none existed before came from the proponents of Pakistan. It was the Muslim League who demanded partition and followed it up with blood-curdling atrocities like murder, rape, arson and pillage in Calcutta, Noakhali and numerous other places in Pakistan. She also acts blind to the history of illegal immigration or planned demographic deluge of Assam. In 1947, the Assamese district of Sylhet was surprisingly found to be a Muslim-majority region due to unchecked migration that lasted for decades. Consequently, Sylhet was separated from India and given away to Pakistan. The author wants India to open up her borders and subsequently get drowned in the flood of often violent illegal migration. The book also proposes false pretexts such as the claim that ‘to govern India, the British introduced separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, which further stoked Hindu-Muslim violence’ (p.9). This is either a deliberate falsehood or the height of historical ignorance. Separate electorates were demanded and snatched away by the Muslims in their bid to secure sufficient number of seats for themselves in an electorate where the Hindus otherwise commanded a significant majority. Likewise, we don’t come across any serious research in the preparation of this book. The shallow findings point to a pleasure trip to the border with a camera on the shoulder. She just copies the fanciful tales told to her by interested parties without displaying any insight or critical assessment.
The author complains that borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. This fails to take an important idea into consideration. In all the corners she travelled in India, the fence was erected to keep the outsiders out, rather than keeping the insiders in, like the Berlin Wall did. This makes the assertion inoperative as that does not restrict anybody’s freedom. It is precisely due to the strict border controls that the 2008 Mumbai attackers, who indiscriminately shot dead 166 innocent people, had to take the circuitous route through the sea to reach India. Unfortunately, the author has interviewed only those people who have illegally entered India or who are suspected to be so. After this false step, she escalates the issue to international level and equates the Kashmir issue to Palestine – the typical Pakistani point of view – saying that what is happening at both the places are the same (p.24). What astounds the readers is the book’s romanticizing of jihadi fighters, embellishing their crooked stories of violent heroism and reproducing their photographs with lethal assault rifles strewn over the chest.
Suchitra displays a vehement hatred towards India, which is her home country. Even though she stays in New York apparently on a permanent basis, she is still an Indian. This hatred is so intense that she appears to be foaming in the mouth at the intensity of the feeling and the rush of invective. She repeatedly refers to Kashmir as Indian-occupied, following the Pakistani rhetoric. She accuses Indians as treating most of the natives in Arunachal border areas as savages to be tamed. Indians are said to be placing images and idols of Hindu gods and goddesses in ruined temples in border areas, as if that is a crime! Also, the statement that India ‘doesn’t issue IDs to its citizens but do so for cattle’ is an outright lie while the cattle ID seem to be taken from trolls in social media. The author finds the practice of erecting shrines to soldiers fallen in battle, offensive as they ‘protect nationalistic fantasy with no historical basis’. Suchitra writes down the names of dead soldiers of the World War from the War Cemetery at Kohima, Nagaland. Not even one Indian is mentioned, while two from present-day Pakistan is listed. But when she quotes a Naga separatist telling her that they used to name their dogs after Indian soldiers, they come out in a perfect desi flavour – Mishra, Natarajan, Singh and Mukesh!
This book proves that the author is not even a liberal who ought to oppose authoritative regimes. Even if the Indian state is accepted as authoritative for argument’s sake, China is infinitely more so. But the author treats China with kid gloves, never uttering a harsh word against them. Kashmir is claimed to be Indian-occupied, but the same logic is not extended to Tibet which should be called Chinese-occupied. Instead, it is the ‘Chinese province of Tibet’ (p.77). She quotes one Karunakar Gupta of London who had ‘found’ forged Aitchison treaties that clinch the argument in favour of China’s claim over Tibet. The 1962 war is said to be caused by ‘India’s suppression of facts, distortion of history, possible alterations of maps and withholding of official documents related to the borders’. She exalts an Indian PoW’s book on the military defeat against China in 1962 while remaining tightlipped on India’s successful intervention in Bangladesh in 1971 and its liberation. It is such tactical omissions and misrepresentations that make the readers doubtful about the author’s real intent and sources of financing for this book.
What is truly hilarious is the author’s utter ignorance of India’s judicial system. Judges in courts are said to be working under contract employment who receive better assessments if they declared more people guilty (p.135). They are accused not to be following rules of evidence, acting without supervision and without any challenge to their authority. Rules are also arbitrary which can be bent at a judge’s disposal. At the same time, we also read about ‘destitute’ intruders who are powerful enough to appeal in the Supreme Court against unfavourable verdicts of lower courts, meeting the hefty fees of lawyers who practice in the apex court. The author is naïve and gullible as to swallow their concocted stories lock stock and barrel. Suchitra narrates a personal anecdote which naturally makes her antagonistic to Indian judiciary. Her father was once assaulted by hired goons of a Tamil politician, nearly killing him. After twelve years of legal wrangling, the trial court acquitted all of them for want of evidence. Is that the reason why she is a staunch anti-Indian? Readers are left to wallow in guess work on this point.
Quite expectably, a considerable portion of the text is reserved to flay the ruling nationalist dispensation of India for their avowed aim to foster national coherence. India is claimed to be transforming into a violent, xenophobic Hindu state waging war against its Constitution and so many of its people. This is the usual political rhetoric heard since the current coalition came to power in the 2014 elections. The book attempts a selective picking up of atrocities that put the government at a disadvantage. Local cow protection gangs are claimed to be operating under the command of the prime minister. The author’s partiality is best exposed by her clever but false implications that only the Muslims get killed in religious riots. It provides a provocative, one-sided narrative of the 2020 Delhi riots too. The most outrageous assertion is that the Indian economy has failed and thousands are fleeing the country to seek political asylum in the US. The author does not mention whether she is speaking this from personal experience!
Suchitra’s making fun of the sacrifice of 21 soldiers’ lives in the 1971 Pakistan war while recapturing territory in Rajasthan is simply ungrateful and mean. This is mocked as ‘reclaiming a transitory sand dune’. Here also, we distinctly hear echoes of Pakistani propaganda. All these canards are being spread while remaining under the protective shield of the Indian army and paramilitary detachments. She stayed at their guest houses, ate their meals, and travelled to the border in army vehicles with armed guard. Sometimes, the guards clear away interlopers to ensure a decent photo op for the author. In return, she strikes up a conversation with lonely and bored soldiers and reminds them of India’s defeat in the 1962 war or how their home state is being oppressed by the central government in Delhi.
This book is a waste of time as not much research has gone into writing it which I suspect to be funded by anti-India agencies. The book is not recommended
August 10, 2021
Read only few selected chapters. Not worth investing a lot of time.
Could have been a brilliant book had it not been full of misrepresentations and blatant falsehoods. When the author presents no arguments for their opinions but makes radical statements which are nothing less than hyperbole, you start wondering what the motivation is. What could have been a brilliant account of people living in the frontiers and their sufferings because of the present concept of nation state, was completely ruined by preconceived notions of the author.
Could have been a brilliant book had it not been full of misrepresentations and blatant falsehoods. When the author presents no arguments for their opinions but makes radical statements which are nothing less than hyperbole, you start wondering what the motivation is. What could have been a brilliant account of people living in the frontiers and their sufferings because of the present concept of nation state, was completely ruined by preconceived notions of the author.
March 28, 2021
There are two types of cartographers: One, who wields a scalpel that brutally amputates shared histories and dissects conjoined memories and the other, desperately realigning and reconfiguring the contours of their own precarious existence for sheer survival. Suchitra Vijayan's extraordinary work is a passionate witness to the colliding worlds of these two sets of cartographers. This certainly has been a labor of love, both in time and space, taking over seven years to complete and covering an incredible 9000 miles along India’s borders. This is not a sanitized commentary. Far from it, this is an angry, passionate and engaging reportage – gut-wrenching postcards from India’s frayed edges.
I have been a keen follower of The Polis Project (https://www.thepolisproject.com/), a hybrid research and journalism initiative founded by Suchitra Vijayan, for quite sometime now that the tone and the texture of this narrative did not come as a surprise. By anchoring her writing in personal stories of unfathomable loss, grief and pain, Suchitra Vijayan has exposed the dehumanizing character of modern states as it strips people of their identity and dignity. And, amidst the chest thumping exultations of a rising India, these subaltern vignettes stand out as sentinels of state failure, corruption and cold apathy
.
August 1, 2022
This disastrous marriage between religion and nationalism will ultimately subvert the values that have held this nation together because it substitutes with murderers and symbols the place meant for substantive values of secular statehood, equality, and justice. India’s future lies in pluralism, parity, reasonable and principled cosmopolitanism and not with settling scores in history.
Although the book seems to be a narrative on the partition of India and Pakistan, it is much beyond the conventional frame of partition literature. The author Suchitra Vijayan aims to show you the lives of the people living in the fringes of this vast nation. Her visits to these isolated villages coupled with stories of oppression and death forms a grim narrative for a lot of political and military decisions in the country.
Instead, the regime that has legislated on what we eat, whom we love, what we desire and how we live has now come for our memory.
Although I appreciated the subject matter and the bravery of the author who visited these villages as a lone female journalist, it really felt like a liberal narrative with little or no nuanced perspectives. What I extremely disliked about the book is how the author tried to give their own opinions on the various aspects of border disputes with a one-directional storyline of what the people told her. It is totally ok to collect experiences and present them, but passing a commentary on how things are, having not seen the other side of the story, it just felt single faceted many times, especially during the Kashmir chapters.
However, this book has compelled me to pick up books on the oppression of the people in Nagaland and understand more about the effect of CAA/NRC in Assam.
I recommend it but tread with caution.
Although the book seems to be a narrative on the partition of India and Pakistan, it is much beyond the conventional frame of partition literature. The author Suchitra Vijayan aims to show you the lives of the people living in the fringes of this vast nation. Her visits to these isolated villages coupled with stories of oppression and death forms a grim narrative for a lot of political and military decisions in the country.
Instead, the regime that has legislated on what we eat, whom we love, what we desire and how we live has now come for our memory.
Although I appreciated the subject matter and the bravery of the author who visited these villages as a lone female journalist, it really felt like a liberal narrative with little or no nuanced perspectives. What I extremely disliked about the book is how the author tried to give their own opinions on the various aspects of border disputes with a one-directional storyline of what the people told her. It is totally ok to collect experiences and present them, but passing a commentary on how things are, having not seen the other side of the story, it just felt single faceted many times, especially during the Kashmir chapters.
However, this book has compelled me to pick up books on the oppression of the people in Nagaland and understand more about the effect of CAA/NRC in Assam.
I recommend it but tread with caution.
Read
April 12, 2021Exceptional writing, built on brave and insightful reportage
August 21, 2021
Biased Narration
Did not like the book, will make sure that I pick the right book next time, also I will make sure that I never ever pick this author.
Did not like the book, will make sure that I pick the right book next time, also I will make sure that I never ever pick this author.
January 29, 2022
Ms. Vijayan is a talented writer and has done some meaningful work as a human rights lawyer however she expressed some radical and very black or white views in her chronicles traversing the border areas of the Indian subcontinent. Indian government is all bad, can do no right and all Muslims are the poor victims. I wish she had presented some more balanced views. The Pakistani state is not saintly either especially on how it continues a very anti-Hindu and anti-Indian ideology in it's school curriculum. Majoritarian nationalism and mistreatment of minorities has taken hold all over South Asia, not just India. Had this been noted in this book I may have had more respect for her work. No plans to read her works again.
February 21, 2022
Why does the author think that todays India did not exists earlier than 70 years ago? Which country has lasted forever, and which country exactly represents its current borders and natives as back in 1000 AD or 1000 BC? What’s the problem with India’s India but ok to call British India or Mughal India?
Nation and state boundaries are always random, generally created by the winners of the wars and wars continue to happen even today.
The only thing which sought attention in this book is the people aspect, and it’s seen everywhere there’s a land and boundary dispute, so nothing unique. People suffer the consequences and only people can come together to relieve it a bit
Nation and state boundaries are always random, generally created by the winners of the wars and wars continue to happen even today.
The only thing which sought attention in this book is the people aspect, and it’s seen everywhere there’s a land and boundary dispute, so nothing unique. People suffer the consequences and only people can come together to relieve it a bit
August 14, 2021
Wow, reading this was an...emotionally turbulent experience. I am the granddaughter of refugees, my entire childhood was coloured by the memory of Partition. My family felt that separation fiercely, clung on to it stubbornly. And I am deeply troubled by how much of the discussion around Partition, today, has come to be about memory, about history. A look at the news shows you that it is not. That bordering is an ongoing, violent process that claims its victims, relentlessly and ceaselessly. This is where Suchitra Vijayan's book triumphs. It is a beautiful book to read, and it reminds us that beauty and violence can co-exist.
February 5, 2023
I think I highlighted every other page of this e-book at a minimum. This is a vital read for exactly the people who will refuse to read it: those who believe in or want to create (out of nothing, out of absolutely no historical precedent) the mythical Hindu rashtra: the Hindu ethnoreligious state. It's shameful, but not surprising, that many of the 1-and 2-star reviews of this book come from these readers, who can only deny for so long that Modi, the BJP, and the right-wing apparatus that silences their dissenters have perhaps irreparably harmed the institutions of Indian democracy—to say nothing of the very real, very physical harm inflicted upon non-Hindus in every corner of the subcontinent.
As is often said, every border implies the violence required to maintain it, and the borders of Hindu India, such as its proponents imagine it, perpetuates a violence that marks the past, the present, and will certainly mark the future. These "borders," arbitrary lines scrawled by the British as they fled the subcontinent, separated families, tribes, memories, and histories; those same lines have metastasized under religious fundamentalist leadership and the broad sanction with which that leadership mobilizes the right-wing foot soldiers who have now cemented their hold on Indian democracy.
The dream of a Hindu rashtra requires the expulsion or extinction of non-Hindus. As Vijayan travels these unnatural borders, she notes the numerous ways in which this policy is already in effect. In mainland India, journalists and activists are beaten, jailed, killed; roving mobs of Hindu nationalists attack Muslims in the name of "defending cows" (the language of genocide—the reduction of minority groups to creatures, to insects, to subhuman entities—is regularly employed against Muslims, such that cows hold higher status in Indian society under the cudgel of the rashtra). In Kashmir, the Indian Army kills, tortures, and strips away the civil rights of Kashmiri Muslims with absolute impunity, and is defended in this by the Indian Supreme Court; in Rajasthan, this same army sheds blood to defend feet of land, shifting sand dunes, mirages; in Assam, more than a million Assamese citizens of India will be stripped of their citizenship because of their faith (suggesting that they were not Indian at all, but rather undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh), thereby creating the single largest stateless population on Earth. These civil abuses, and the physical ways in which they are enforced, underscore how the borders make us less safe, less secure, less free.
The India that Hindu nationalists want has never existed, and should never exist. The only way to bring it about is to destroy everything that India is and has been: a vibrant, heterogenous, secular state. What I fear is that Modi, or whatever right-wing government succeeds him now that the seeds of fascism have bloomed, will do exactly that—that these borders, like the barbed wire that mark them, can only strangle, maim, and shred the Indian state and the people, Hindu and non-Hindu alike, it purports to protect.
As is often said, every border implies the violence required to maintain it, and the borders of Hindu India, such as its proponents imagine it, perpetuates a violence that marks the past, the present, and will certainly mark the future. These "borders," arbitrary lines scrawled by the British as they fled the subcontinent, separated families, tribes, memories, and histories; those same lines have metastasized under religious fundamentalist leadership and the broad sanction with which that leadership mobilizes the right-wing foot soldiers who have now cemented their hold on Indian democracy.
The dream of a Hindu rashtra requires the expulsion or extinction of non-Hindus. As Vijayan travels these unnatural borders, she notes the numerous ways in which this policy is already in effect. In mainland India, journalists and activists are beaten, jailed, killed; roving mobs of Hindu nationalists attack Muslims in the name of "defending cows" (the language of genocide—the reduction of minority groups to creatures, to insects, to subhuman entities—is regularly employed against Muslims, such that cows hold higher status in Indian society under the cudgel of the rashtra). In Kashmir, the Indian Army kills, tortures, and strips away the civil rights of Kashmiri Muslims with absolute impunity, and is defended in this by the Indian Supreme Court; in Rajasthan, this same army sheds blood to defend feet of land, shifting sand dunes, mirages; in Assam, more than a million Assamese citizens of India will be stripped of their citizenship because of their faith (suggesting that they were not Indian at all, but rather undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh), thereby creating the single largest stateless population on Earth. These civil abuses, and the physical ways in which they are enforced, underscore how the borders make us less safe, less secure, less free.
The India that Hindu nationalists want has never existed, and should never exist. The only way to bring it about is to destroy everything that India is and has been: a vibrant, heterogenous, secular state. What I fear is that Modi, or whatever right-wing government succeeds him now that the seeds of fascism have bloomed, will do exactly that—that these borders, like the barbed wire that mark them, can only strangle, maim, and shred the Indian state and the people, Hindu and non-Hindu alike, it purports to protect.
March 12, 2021
A fresh and original work. Brilliantly written, it weaves history, landscapes and human trauma into a ceaseless whole. Destined to be among the great counter-narratives of our beleaguered times.
January 8, 2022
A very moving catalogue of stories that the author has gathered on her travels along the borders that India shares with her neighbours. Its gut wrenching to read about the many ways in which the Indian state has not only failed but actively persecuted so many communities living literally and metaphorically on the fringes of the nation, at risk of falling off at any time. From that perspective, it is absolutely critical that these voices are heard and their histories preserved in our collective conscious so that we know the full weight of our opinions that we like to arm ourselves with when sparring with ‘the other side’ in online debates, living room conversations etc.
In terms of writing, the author has her way with words to convey emotions such as anger, helplessness and resignation that her subjects express. I do wish the author had focused a bit more on specific systems and processes that enable the widespread atrocities, but given the scope and length of the author’s journey, I can imagine how that would have lengthened the book quite a bit.
In terms of writing, the author has her way with words to convey emotions such as anger, helplessness and resignation that her subjects express. I do wish the author had focused a bit more on specific systems and processes that enable the widespread atrocities, but given the scope and length of the author’s journey, I can imagine how that would have lengthened the book quite a bit.
April 21, 2021
I have mixed feelings in rating the book a 3. On the one hand I was very disappointed in the presentation and writing. The author visits many small communities on various sections of the Indian border, but there were NO MAPS showing where she was!! For an India-novice like myself this was very irritating...India borders Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Pakistan, China...maybe more. It would have really helped my understanding and enjoyment if good maps were incluc]ded with each chapter, showing where the author was and how she travelled there. Secondly, there were many grainy black and white photographs but NONE of them had captions. Sometimes I could guess what the photographi represented based on the nearby text, but often not. Thirdly (and finally), though the author did interview several Indian security troops and many poor, abused citizens, there was (in several cases) little historical context included to backup (or undermine) and explane the context of their stories.
On the "positive" side, this book really made me realize how badly the British Empire screwed things up when they left India, and how prejudice is the present Indian government. With their "citizenry register" and anti-Muslim thinking, it appears that India is on the way to "legalizing" a genocide of several undersirable subcultures. The Indian military already seems to get away with atrocity after atrocity with no consequences.
I have read other histories of India after the partition (India and Pakistan) but this book made me realize that I need to read more about this situation in modern India and its present leader's efforts to forge a Hindu-centric government.
On the "positive" side, this book really made me realize how badly the British Empire screwed things up when they left India, and how prejudice is the present Indian government. With their "citizenry register" and anti-Muslim thinking, it appears that India is on the way to "legalizing" a genocide of several undersirable subcultures. The Indian military already seems to get away with atrocity after atrocity with no consequences.
I have read other histories of India after the partition (India and Pakistan) but this book made me realize that I need to read more about this situation in modern India and its present leader's efforts to forge a Hindu-centric government.
August 17, 2022
"Maps are objects of power, and they do not belong to the people. Maps are keepers of a state's knowledge: the distances, the miles, the nautical miles, and where things begin and end."
"The struggle over geography, the struggle to define the frontiers of our home, has existed throughout history. But when maps became the arsenal of imperialism and colonial conquest, people, in turn, became surveys and statistics. For the maps of this world to make sense, many fictions have been put in place, and we have been taught to treat these fictions as fact. We imagine nations out of nonexistent lines-sometimes amputating communities or whole cultures to make way for a country-and reinforce the lines with violence lest they cease to exist altogether. Borders make unequal people."
"...they are all part of the histories of occupation violence and multiple exiles, and they are also all remarkable bards, storytellers trying to make sense of their world's injustices, inequities, and violence."
"In my quest to understand India through her border, I found a nation in the middle of an extraordinary crisis. The once great promise of an emerging "global power" had waned. History was being swiftly rewritten."
"Where you are born, what passport you hold, can shrink your world, cripple you, and sometimes kill you."
"The guide I can offer to my readers is this: view it as a scrapbook assembled together as an archive of the personal, the social, the political, told through images, texts, lists, other people's poetry, and maps."
"While British rule unified the subcontinent politically under a single administrative power, it further divided its people on religious grounds. To govern India, the British introduced separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, which further stoked Hindu-Muslim violence."
"Partition forever altered the political and cultural landscape of South Asia. In the immediate aftermath, 17.9 million people migrated across the Indian subcontinent. Muslims on the Indian side of the new borders, and Hindus and Sikhs caught on the Pakistani side, fled their ancestral homes."
"The estimated number killed between March 1947 and January 1948 ranges from 180,000 to 1 million. There were 3.4 million "missing" members of targeted minorities in the 1951 census. Before India could find her voice, screams from massacres and riots reverberated throughout the country."
"Today, the subcontinent's borders are usually categorized and studied with a focus on the three lines that gave birth to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and India: the Durand, Radcliffe, and McMahon Lines, all named after British civil servants who knew very little of the regions they divided."
"It is not my goal to "bear witness" or "give voice to the voiceless." Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices-where native informants pose themselves to become voices of the empire. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. My role, then, and this book's role, is to find in their in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty."
"It is not just the South Asian borders that are unraveling: borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. What happened in Bosnia was repeated in Rwanda, and what happens in Palestine is happening in Kashmir."
"The British fought three wars in Afghanistan over a period of eighty years, finally granting Afghanistan independence in 1919."
"When we rewrite history, we exclude people. We violently cast Muslims, who are equal inheritors of this land and its past, into foreigners. When we exclude them from our history, we can quietly exclude them from this land. If we could preserve these ruins and see them as part of our shared history, then perhaps we could live in a present that makes space for multiple ways of life to coexist."
"Flowers bloom here regardless of the ruined lives, anguish, and traumatic experiences, and children chase orange-and-purple kites. Life prevails over death. If only freedom could as well."
"Cricket has become the embodiment of bourgeois nationalism, performed for commerce and politics."
"Words are powerful, and they have the capacity to normalize hate. To call a human being illegal is not only racist and inaccurate, but also dehumanizing. No human being is illegal. existing is not illegal."
"Mathew Edney, a geographer and historian, writes that "to govern territories, one must know them." But can one govern knowing just the territories, and not its people?"
"When every family here has lost someone, so cruelly, with so much violence, no one thinks of this as extraordinary."
"When you are powerless, time will acquit every crime committed against you."
"When you go home tell them of us and say; 'For your tomorrow we gave our today.'"
"Public executions and extrajudicial killings of civilians are a tried and tested counter-insurgency strategy of inflicting terror, and they have been used across time and geography in India and elsewhere. Modern states, including United States, Israel, France, and many others continue this practice to date."
"At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty, and secular ideals. If we are to learn from history, we must begin by imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation-states, without borders that kill."
"The lines we draw, the fences we build, and the borders we enforce are illusions. They are not real, but they give birth to violent consequences, and have become a part of collective consciousness. Humanity's most significant moral and political failures of this century begin with these lines. At the border, even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence."
"As the Indian government has passed legislation to extend the NRC to the rest of the country, it seems certain that the largest crisis of manufactured statelessness in human history is forthcoming."
"India was not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol; it does not have a single national legal framework that lays out how refugees must be treated. Instead, over the years India has applied varying parameters and policies to various refugee groups. About forty thousand Rohingya refugees reside in India, where they are constantly taunted and threatened with deportation. Their future remains uncertain."
"Like Myanmar, India is manufacturing foreigners out of Indian citizens."
"Military occupation makes weapons out of the people they seek to control, turning them into agents of their own oppression."
"Radically remaking an occupied city is not only meant to limit protests, it is also meant to create chaos and confusion. It is as much about control as it is about disciplining and punishing Kashmiris, breaking them in every way possible. Encircling and entombing, the local population with concertina wire cuts them off, quarantines communities, and makes life socially, politically, and economically unbearable."
"The women who survived the partition, who witnessed the perils of this border, tell a different story because they live another life. A life where the violence of the border is not at the fence, or in the trenches, but at the center of their universe."
"The borders have made our minds smaller, our languages die without care, and our people petty."
"India is not yet a nation, she's a puzzle rearranging herself."
"Perhaps all daughters ask these questions, trying to make sense of their family histories and realities. We are constantly assembling these puzzles in our minds, and are always a few pieces short of piecing together our memory's prologue. We are perpetually in search of some lost anecdote or some ghost of a character, some knowledge that would serve as the missing piece."
When you are forced to leave, you not only lose the land your ancestors lived in, you lose a part of them as well. With every act of migration, you lose a little bit of your history, you leave your dead behind, their graves, the streets they walked on, and the ground beneath their feet. You are made a little hollow by the act of departure, and the home you abandon remakes itself in your absence."
"The struggle over geography, the struggle to define the frontiers of our home, has existed throughout history. But when maps became the arsenal of imperialism and colonial conquest, people, in turn, became surveys and statistics. For the maps of this world to make sense, many fictions have been put in place, and we have been taught to treat these fictions as fact. We imagine nations out of nonexistent lines-sometimes amputating communities or whole cultures to make way for a country-and reinforce the lines with violence lest they cease to exist altogether. Borders make unequal people."
"...they are all part of the histories of occupation violence and multiple exiles, and they are also all remarkable bards, storytellers trying to make sense of their world's injustices, inequities, and violence."
"In my quest to understand India through her border, I found a nation in the middle of an extraordinary crisis. The once great promise of an emerging "global power" had waned. History was being swiftly rewritten."
"Where you are born, what passport you hold, can shrink your world, cripple you, and sometimes kill you."
"The guide I can offer to my readers is this: view it as a scrapbook assembled together as an archive of the personal, the social, the political, told through images, texts, lists, other people's poetry, and maps."
"While British rule unified the subcontinent politically under a single administrative power, it further divided its people on religious grounds. To govern India, the British introduced separate Hindu and Muslim electorates, which further stoked Hindu-Muslim violence."
"Partition forever altered the political and cultural landscape of South Asia. In the immediate aftermath, 17.9 million people migrated across the Indian subcontinent. Muslims on the Indian side of the new borders, and Hindus and Sikhs caught on the Pakistani side, fled their ancestral homes."
"The estimated number killed between March 1947 and January 1948 ranges from 180,000 to 1 million. There were 3.4 million "missing" members of targeted minorities in the 1951 census. Before India could find her voice, screams from massacres and riots reverberated throughout the country."
"Today, the subcontinent's borders are usually categorized and studied with a focus on the three lines that gave birth to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and India: the Durand, Radcliffe, and McMahon Lines, all named after British civil servants who knew very little of the regions they divided."
"It is not my goal to "bear witness" or "give voice to the voiceless." Such writings have long been implicated in the history of colonial ethnographic practices-where native informants pose themselves to become voices of the empire. The people in this book are eloquent advocates of their history and their struggles. My role, then, and this book's role, is to find in their in their articulations a critique of the nation-state, its violence, and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty."
"It is not just the South Asian borders that are unraveling: borders around the world are enclosing and suffocating their people rather than guaranteeing their freedom. What happened in Bosnia was repeated in Rwanda, and what happens in Palestine is happening in Kashmir."
"The British fought three wars in Afghanistan over a period of eighty years, finally granting Afghanistan independence in 1919."
"When we rewrite history, we exclude people. We violently cast Muslims, who are equal inheritors of this land and its past, into foreigners. When we exclude them from our history, we can quietly exclude them from this land. If we could preserve these ruins and see them as part of our shared history, then perhaps we could live in a present that makes space for multiple ways of life to coexist."
"Flowers bloom here regardless of the ruined lives, anguish, and traumatic experiences, and children chase orange-and-purple kites. Life prevails over death. If only freedom could as well."
"Cricket has become the embodiment of bourgeois nationalism, performed for commerce and politics."
"Words are powerful, and they have the capacity to normalize hate. To call a human being illegal is not only racist and inaccurate, but also dehumanizing. No human being is illegal. existing is not illegal."
"Mathew Edney, a geographer and historian, writes that "to govern territories, one must know them." But can one govern knowing just the territories, and not its people?"
"When every family here has lost someone, so cruelly, with so much violence, no one thinks of this as extraordinary."
"When you are powerless, time will acquit every crime committed against you."
"When you go home tell them of us and say; 'For your tomorrow we gave our today.'"
"Public executions and extrajudicial killings of civilians are a tried and tested counter-insurgency strategy of inflicting terror, and they have been used across time and geography in India and elsewhere. Modern states, including United States, Israel, France, and many others continue this practice to date."
"At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty, and secular ideals. If we are to learn from history, we must begin by imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation-states, without borders that kill."
"The lines we draw, the fences we build, and the borders we enforce are illusions. They are not real, but they give birth to violent consequences, and have become a part of collective consciousness. Humanity's most significant moral and political failures of this century begin with these lines. At the border, even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence."
"As the Indian government has passed legislation to extend the NRC to the rest of the country, it seems certain that the largest crisis of manufactured statelessness in human history is forthcoming."
"India was not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol; it does not have a single national legal framework that lays out how refugees must be treated. Instead, over the years India has applied varying parameters and policies to various refugee groups. About forty thousand Rohingya refugees reside in India, where they are constantly taunted and threatened with deportation. Their future remains uncertain."
"Like Myanmar, India is manufacturing foreigners out of Indian citizens."
"Military occupation makes weapons out of the people they seek to control, turning them into agents of their own oppression."
"Radically remaking an occupied city is not only meant to limit protests, it is also meant to create chaos and confusion. It is as much about control as it is about disciplining and punishing Kashmiris, breaking them in every way possible. Encircling and entombing, the local population with concertina wire cuts them off, quarantines communities, and makes life socially, politically, and economically unbearable."
"The women who survived the partition, who witnessed the perils of this border, tell a different story because they live another life. A life where the violence of the border is not at the fence, or in the trenches, but at the center of their universe."
"The borders have made our minds smaller, our languages die without care, and our people petty."
"India is not yet a nation, she's a puzzle rearranging herself."
"Perhaps all daughters ask these questions, trying to make sense of their family histories and realities. We are constantly assembling these puzzles in our minds, and are always a few pieces short of piecing together our memory's prologue. We are perpetually in search of some lost anecdote or some ghost of a character, some knowledge that would serve as the missing piece."
When you are forced to leave, you not only lose the land your ancestors lived in, you lose a part of them as well. With every act of migration, you lose a little bit of your history, you leave your dead behind, their graves, the streets they walked on, and the ground beneath their feet. You are made a little hollow by the act of departure, and the home you abandon remakes itself in your absence."
May 30, 2021
This book could have been much better. I will tell how- the author has put so much efforts by travelling on-ground and ideally, should have been objective. She comes with a mindset that declares- all Muslims are under threat; Indian Army is bad; Indian Govt is terrible.
The delivery if the book is dragging and biased but the content is excellent!
The delivery if the book is dragging and biased but the content is excellent!
June 21, 2022
Part travel story and part tragic history, Suchitra Vijayan traces the borders of modern India in Midnight’s Borders. The borders, bloody lines drawn by colonial masters without on-the-ground knowledge, cut through villages, farms, and even houses delineate between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They were all drawn in three months right before the partition in 1947 – lines on a paper that would cost the lives of 500,000 and 2 million people and the upheaval displaced another 10-20 million. Vijayan describes the brutality still inherent in these lines and the impact on those trapped on both sides – and sometimes between.
This book is heart-wrenching to read. Vijayan meets people all along the borders who have been imprisoned, stripped of citizenship and are stateless, victims of extrajudicial attacks and murders, or are torn from their families just because of where an imaginary line was hastily drawn on a map. Some that stand out are the man whose home is the no man’s land between border fences and is constantly bombarded by floodlights, the people stripped of citizenship and lament in prison camps in Assam, and Hilal - killed in the Kashmiri occupation.
Another story is of a commission to mark the line from the map onto the lands, but when they went to build the markers twelve years later, the notes were gone. The only copy remaining were the handwritten notes of the guide, now blind, who helped point out where the border was. (“ten feet from the cactus and four stones from the creek”)
“...Indian and Pakistan have fought for decades over a few inches of land - a sand dune, a small island formed after a hurricane - and all the while twelve miles of the official border might be based on the memory of a blind man. When I finished telling Prasad and Bhim this story, Prasad nodded. “It happens,” he said. “India has such a long border. It is possible that some of these lines are not what they are.”
Things are clearly getting worse in the border regions under the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of Modi as lynchings of muslims, the stripping of citizenship and rights of minorities, and the full occupation and blackout of Kashmir has increased in intensity.
“After imposing the blockade [on Kashmir], India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, abrogated Article 370 and Article 35A of the constitution – the laws that conferred special status to Kashmir and bifurcated the state into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. With the abolition of Article 35A, India has officially become a settler-colonial power in Kashmir. Many Kashmiris fear that India will settle non-Kashmiris there, and fundamentally change its demographic makeup.”
Vijayan’s story really helps shine a light on the absurdity of national borders as a concept. Imaginary lines drawn on a map made real through violence on the periphery. It’s especially heinous in regions of the globe where the lines weren’t even drawn by the people who live there, but by Europeans carving the world into spheres of capitalistic influence. The amount of blood spilled in Asia and Africa for lines arbitrarily drawn by Europeans is staggering.
“Illusion is the most tenacious weed in the collective consciousness,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1921. “History teaches by it has no pupils.” The lines we draw, the fences we build, and the borders we enforce are illusions. They are not real, but they give birth to violent consequences, and have become part of a collective consciousness. Humanity’s most significant moral and political failures of this century begin with these lines. At the border, even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty, and secular ideals. If we are to learn from history, we must begin by imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation-states, without borders that kill.
This book is a powerful warning about the dangers of othering, the lasting wounds of colonialism, and the generational trauma of war and genocide. My only wish is that this book contained a map of the borderlands that Vijayan traveled through. As someone not familiar with the detailed specifics of these regions, something I could flip back to with the wider picture would be helpful. I always had to have a computer nearby to look up where specific border lines or states were.
“When you are forced to leave, you not only lose the land your ancestors lived in, you lose a part of them as well. With every act of migration, you lose a little bit of your history, you leave your dead behind, their graves, the streets they walked on, and the ground beneath their feet. You are made a little hollow by the act of departure, and the home you abandon remakes itself in your absence.”
This book is heart-wrenching to read. Vijayan meets people all along the borders who have been imprisoned, stripped of citizenship and are stateless, victims of extrajudicial attacks and murders, or are torn from their families just because of where an imaginary line was hastily drawn on a map. Some that stand out are the man whose home is the no man’s land between border fences and is constantly bombarded by floodlights, the people stripped of citizenship and lament in prison camps in Assam, and Hilal - killed in the Kashmiri occupation.
Another story is of a commission to mark the line from the map onto the lands, but when they went to build the markers twelve years later, the notes were gone. The only copy remaining were the handwritten notes of the guide, now blind, who helped point out where the border was. (“ten feet from the cactus and four stones from the creek”)
“...Indian and Pakistan have fought for decades over a few inches of land - a sand dune, a small island formed after a hurricane - and all the while twelve miles of the official border might be based on the memory of a blind man. When I finished telling Prasad and Bhim this story, Prasad nodded. “It happens,” he said. “India has such a long border. It is possible that some of these lines are not what they are.”
Things are clearly getting worse in the border regions under the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of Modi as lynchings of muslims, the stripping of citizenship and rights of minorities, and the full occupation and blackout of Kashmir has increased in intensity.
“After imposing the blockade [on Kashmir], India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, abrogated Article 370 and Article 35A of the constitution – the laws that conferred special status to Kashmir and bifurcated the state into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. With the abolition of Article 35A, India has officially become a settler-colonial power in Kashmir. Many Kashmiris fear that India will settle non-Kashmiris there, and fundamentally change its demographic makeup.”
Vijayan’s story really helps shine a light on the absurdity of national borders as a concept. Imaginary lines drawn on a map made real through violence on the periphery. It’s especially heinous in regions of the globe where the lines weren’t even drawn by the people who live there, but by Europeans carving the world into spheres of capitalistic influence. The amount of blood spilled in Asia and Africa for lines arbitrarily drawn by Europeans is staggering.
“Illusion is the most tenacious weed in the collective consciousness,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1921. “History teaches by it has no pupils.” The lines we draw, the fences we build, and the borders we enforce are illusions. They are not real, but they give birth to violent consequences, and have become part of a collective consciousness. Humanity’s most significant moral and political failures of this century begin with these lines. At the border, even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality, and violence. At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty, and secular ideals. If we are to learn from history, we must begin by imagining the possibilities of freedom without nation-states, without borders that kill.
This book is a powerful warning about the dangers of othering, the lasting wounds of colonialism, and the generational trauma of war and genocide. My only wish is that this book contained a map of the borderlands that Vijayan traveled through. As someone not familiar with the detailed specifics of these regions, something I could flip back to with the wider picture would be helpful. I always had to have a computer nearby to look up where specific border lines or states were.
“When you are forced to leave, you not only lose the land your ancestors lived in, you lose a part of them as well. With every act of migration, you lose a little bit of your history, you leave your dead behind, their graves, the streets they walked on, and the ground beneath their feet. You are made a little hollow by the act of departure, and the home you abandon remakes itself in your absence.”
April 24, 2021
There couldn’t have been a better review than the one I had read earlier and I reproduce it below.
“Suchitra Vijayan’s complex history Midnight’s Borders shows how India’s policies have fueled border conflicts, with devastating effects.
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.”
“Suchitra Vijayan’s complex history Midnight’s Borders shows how India’s policies have fueled border conflicts, with devastating effects.
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.”
April 28, 2023
A country resides within its borders but very often we forget or ignore the plight of the humans that live on these margins which make a nation whole. The violence that engulfs them and is a way of life for many is relegated to a footnote in the country's collective consciousness.
As the author puts it " At the border even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality and violence. At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty and secular ideals"
From China, Bangladesh, Myanmar to the Pakistan border, the stories of common folk who have lost their homes and families in the name of sovereignty is a sober reminder of the human cost of reasserting borders.
Suchitra Vijayan does a phenomenal job of reporting from these places and telling the stories of people that deserve to be heard. The political callousness, the lack of will amongst the people in power to do what is necessary makes this an all the more important book to be read. Vijayan's empathetic reportage is both eye opening and demands self introspection.
As the author puts it " At the border even the most civilized among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality and violence. At the border, we eschew all that we otherwise celebrate under the demands of freedom, progress, liberty and secular ideals"
From China, Bangladesh, Myanmar to the Pakistan border, the stories of common folk who have lost their homes and families in the name of sovereignty is a sober reminder of the human cost of reasserting borders.
Suchitra Vijayan does a phenomenal job of reporting from these places and telling the stories of people that deserve to be heard. The political callousness, the lack of will amongst the people in power to do what is necessary makes this an all the more important book to be read. Vijayan's empathetic reportage is both eye opening and demands self introspection.
March 29, 2024
"Pain is for the living; the dead are immune to the consequences of death" - Suchitra Vijayan. I started reading this book 15 months ago and I could not finish it just like reading a book.It was heavy, poignant, chilling, thought provoking,more importantly the book is all about the living stories of people caught in living with the lines, drawn by people who had no connection with the land. I couldn't help myself from the pricks caused in the core of my heart by these stories of deprivation, loss, crisis and what not. I can't even fathom how the author went through documenting these stories of people who are not dead but living dead, over 7 years across 9,000 miles of these Indian borderlands. Can't call it just a book. The history we know and have read extensively in schools or colleges are the history of the high places and leading people. The following masses are not included in the chapters. I'm glad that in this lifetime, someone and someone who is a woman, gave us a history of the people, the following masses.
December 13, 2021
Colonialism still violently haunts the subcontinent by way of the borders it left behind, and the myths were manufactured afterwards to justify those borders. The author travels 7000 miles of India’s borderlands and reports on the lives of the millions of people who live in the areas. From the borders of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Tibet, and Kashmir, the Indian state’s border politics are cruel and violent. The border always comes with brutal military occupation, creates informal economies of sex trafficking, and — as Modi attempts to transform India into a Hindu state— is increasingly used to disenfranchise Muslims and other religious minorities who’ve been living in that area, oftentimes locking them up for decades on faulty grounds, or allowing pogroms to go unchecked under their watch. A haunting book and a good example of how the state itself is a weapon that can be easily wielded against whomever the state decides.
August 24, 2022
Rating : 3.7/4
The book has mixed reviews online. While I don’t agree with most negative ones, I do think a few chapters have been written with an extreme viewpoint - for most parts it’s difficult to separate the author’s personal opinion from actual facts. The ideological differences and the author’s political views have interfered in the writing quite a few times.
While I deeply respect the author’s effort, dedication and time spent in writing these stories, I do think some were left incomplete or were rather abstract. I struggled to find a message in some chapters. The accounts detailed in this book are informative and force you to learn about the multiple facets of this country, mostly the ones not covered by media. While the first ~150 pages of this book were unputdownable, the writing feels a bit forced after a point, and then picks up again towards the end.
The book has mixed reviews online. While I don’t agree with most negative ones, I do think a few chapters have been written with an extreme viewpoint - for most parts it’s difficult to separate the author’s personal opinion from actual facts. The ideological differences and the author’s political views have interfered in the writing quite a few times.
While I deeply respect the author’s effort, dedication and time spent in writing these stories, I do think some were left incomplete or were rather abstract. I struggled to find a message in some chapters. The accounts detailed in this book are informative and force you to learn about the multiple facets of this country, mostly the ones not covered by media. While the first ~150 pages of this book were unputdownable, the writing feels a bit forced after a point, and then picks up again towards the end.
November 23, 2024
This beautifully written book centers on the experiences of people living on the periphery of the Indian nation-state, shedding light on the injustices—and at times the absurdities—of our borders. The author weaves together stories collected during her travels along India’s borders, from Bengal and the northeastern states to Kashmir and the western regions. These narratives explore various facets of the border, from its origins shaped by incompetent colonial officers to its profound gendered and economic implications. The focus on people’s lived experiences is what makes this book so compelling, and it offers a unique perspective on the enduring legacy of India’s partition and the complexities of nation-building.
January 31, 2024
This book is exceptional. Vijayan gives us a compelling document that’s not just political history but also a travelogue. She carefully tracks human resolve horribly suppressed by ethnonationalism and brutal hatred. I recommend this book to everyone really. The distinct lives along India’s bordes are very compassionately treated. Vijayan precisely lays out the ways that violence enacted against mostly Muslim groups is not just physical and emotional acts, but often lies under the bureaucratic tokens of identification documents and military checkpoints, legacies of colonial rule. Never have I truly felt and understood how artificial our borders are today despite their increased militarization.
January 23, 2025
Midnight’s Borders is an important journey of self-discovery by an Indian who, like many, grew up unaware of the complexities and sufferings at the edges of a nation. She travels 900 miles along India's borders over a period of 8 years traversing the Durand Line, McMohan Line, Radcliff Line and LoC and brings about hidden stories from the border areas. Her sympathies are obvious but it is hard to find fault when you are brought to face the sufferings of all the people whose identities have been defined or sharpened and people compelled to choose sides.
Borders are not always demarcations on the ground; they have also often been imposed on the minds of people....
Borders are not always demarcations on the ground; they have also often been imposed on the minds of people....
April 6, 2022
Loved this book for the numerous personal accounts of people interviewed and their life along India's borders. These stories should be talked about loudly so that something can be done to make it better, no matter how much time it takes.
For people who think that "illegal immigrants" are all a danger to the country, this book should help them in getting a better understanding of how and why people become immigrants and how it's a tragedy rather than a luxury to leave one's native.
My issue with this book is that in a lot of instances, the author's opinionated voice becomes very heavy and it tries to force us to agree and accept all her inferences, theories and beliefs. I'd have loved it if the book had just told us these stories/tragedies and then left it to us to figure out the rest.
For people who think that "illegal immigrants" are all a danger to the country, this book should help them in getting a better understanding of how and why people become immigrants and how it's a tragedy rather than a luxury to leave one's native.
My issue with this book is that in a lot of instances, the author's opinionated voice becomes very heavy and it tries to force us to agree and accept all her inferences, theories and beliefs. I'd have loved it if the book had just told us these stories/tragedies and then left it to us to figure out the rest.
April 25, 2021
The moment I read the blurb of the book, I knew I had to read it. Living in the heartland of India, you hardly get to go behind the scenes, to the periphery of the country, except when you read news of ceasefire violations or when you travel to a tourist site near the border, tailor made to be feel-good.
The book has the potential to ruffle some feathers, it makes you feel uneasy and it needs open mindedness to go through some author and first person accounts. I found myself having to suppress my own biases sometimes.
I find the trope of "we are all the same"and "borders are just lines drawn on a map" to be a result of imagination of someone who has idealistic utopian fantasies which unfortunately would never get fulfilled. Therefore, when the author starts to digress from the first person accounts and gives her own commentary on the anecdotes or the current state of events in the country, I felt that the geopolitics of the region, the state or cross border policies get oversimplified.
The book has the potential to ruffle some feathers, it makes you feel uneasy and it needs open mindedness to go through some author and first person accounts. I found myself having to suppress my own biases sometimes.
I find the trope of "we are all the same"and "borders are just lines drawn on a map" to be a result of imagination of someone who has idealistic utopian fantasies which unfortunately would never get fulfilled. Therefore, when the author starts to digress from the first person accounts and gives her own commentary on the anecdotes or the current state of events in the country, I felt that the geopolitics of the region, the state or cross border policies get oversimplified.
November 21, 2021
This was really excellent! A very thorough look at the various border conflicts and contradictions of the modern Indian state. Gives a good look at the macro historical and present-day picture while also remaining very grounded in the stories of individual people interviewed for the book. Author also has a keen sense of political self-awareness that enriches their work
December 2, 2022
Essential. Brutal.
December 17, 2022
Will never think of borders in the same way again. Will never be fascinated by them and wonder about what lies beyond. I’ll probably think about the tragic stories those borders must have created.
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