Midnights Borders, Suchitra Vijayan
Midnights Borders, Suchitra Vijayan
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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Midnight's Borders
A People's History of Modern India

Author: Suchitra Vijayan

Narrator: Sunny Patel

Unabridged: 8 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/26/2021

Synopsis

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, we hear from those whose stories are never told: 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.

About Suchitra Vijayan

Suchitra Vijayan was born and raised in Madras, India. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, GQ, the Boston Review, the Nation, and Foreign Policy. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before cofounding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is an award-winning photographer, as well as the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. She lives in New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Anand

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 bo......more

Goodreads review by Gopa

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......more

Goodreads review by Jyotsna

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, pa......more

Goodreads review by Anil

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 Ind......more

Goodreads review by Madhubrata

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, t......more

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