Scan stories of India’s borders with lawyer Suchitra Vijayan

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, April 17

According to Suchitra Vijayan, a lawyer, human rights activist and now an author, crossing a border is an act of privilege that she discovered through travelling 9,000 mile journey over seven years to India’s borderlands.

Sharing stories of her travel and people of communities living in these borderlands and their connect with their past and our present, in her book Midnight’s Borders – A People’s History of Modern India, Vijayan interacted with members of Majha House.

Vijayan had travelled through the borders of Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, to explore the history of communities living there and how colonialism and later border conflicts impacted their lives.

She visited places where India shares boundaries with Myanmar, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan. She also explored the history of divisive politics with Partition of India and the Citizenship Amendment Act in present time.

“I wanted people to read the book as it took me 10 years to conceive the idea, travel and publish it. My journey as a journalist and human rights activist took me to five continents, cities of conflict and sites of genocide. My very first travel was to Afghanistan border with Pakistan. People living in these borderlands, especially in region of conflicts, are living face-to-face with violence, statelessness, survival and lot of issues that have been overlooked,” she shared.

She said she had started her journey in India in 2014 and through the end of her travel she witnessed how fragmentation of identities had begun at deep levels. “When I first travelled to these places, the questions I encountered were not specific in nature. But towards the end of my travel, in 2018-19, something changed,” she said.