Neha’s Reviews > Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India > Status Update

“In Assam, over 60 ppl have lost their lives in the process of proving they are citizens. And due to frustration, anxiety, and helplessness related to NRC and fearing incarceration in detention camps, others have taken their own lives. More have died under mysterious circumstances in detention camps…The lucky among them get mentioned in a news report, only to be immediately forgotten, most never named” - p. 170

“When every family here has lost someone, so cruelly, with so much violence, no one thinks of this as extraordinary. He added ‘we think it is normal…what do we talk about after sundown with our neighbors? Exchange notes on our dead - my family lost three, yours lost four. In these cases, one is left to nothing but regret…no justice.’” - p. 117 about Nagaland re: Indian and Japanese occupations

“The violence here was generational. Mr. N spoke about the many silences that people carried within them: ‘Many of us haven’t spoken about what we saw, some of us have chosen to move on, others don’t even think of the great violence done to us as violence anymore…it’s all so normal now’” - p. 117 about Nagaland

“‘My friend’s other advice to me was, ‘Don’t orientalize the beauty of this region.’ Beauty and violence can coexist, but never as a binary. This stuck with me. I was not here to tell their stories but to critique a state that was complicit in silence, violence and erasure.” - pg. 112

“No one here thought traveling to see our family was ‘illegal,’ I never thought I was crossing an international border; I was going to see my aunt.’” - pg 82

“When you live so close to it, it is hard to understand what a border really is. ‘We used to cross the border all the time before. I remember my mother and I wading through shallow waters during low tide to reach the other side,’ Jamshed said, pointing in the direction of Bangladesh.” - pg. 82

“The game of cricket, says Sharif, has changed beyond recognition. Sportsmanship no longer drives the sport, he laments. Cricket has become the embodiment of bourgeois nationalism, performed for commerce and politics” - pg. 73

“‘It feels like partition is still alive,’ says Sharif, of living a border becoming even more fortified. ‘We pass its memory on from one generation to another.’” - pg 74

“When we rewrite history, we exclude people. We violently cast Muslims, who are equal inheritors of this land and it’s 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.” - pg 67

“There is no end to the ideology of difference” -Pakistani political scientist and writer Eqbal Ahmad