February 1, 2021
A viewpoint of modern India via a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey along its many borders. An India-born barrister, journalist, and photographer who worked for the U.N. war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before founding the Resettlement Legal Aid project in Cairo, Vijayan spent years interviewing stateless refugees around the entire border of India. She uses those stories to create a candid and heartbreaking work of expos� journalism. "The journey was...a return home," she writes. "But after being away for more than a decade, I was coming back to a place I no longer recognized. I wanted to understand 'my country, ' and I wanted to make sense of the ongoing violence at its borders, the debates over nationalism, citizenship, and the unanswered questions about belonging. I traveled to the frayed edges of the republic to meet the people who inhabit the margins of the state and to study the human toll of decades of aggressive, territorial nationalism." Vijayan incisively shows how the lives of countless people are governed by often arbitrary borders created by imperialists who knew nothing of the ethnic makeup of the regions. She divides the book into five main sections, delineated along specific borders: the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, created by the looming Russian threat to British control of India in 1893, also known as the Durand Line; the India-Bangladesh border, another "contested colonial inheritance"; the India-China border; the India-Myanmar border; and the India-Pakistan border, "one of the most complex, violent, and dangerous boundaries in the world." Each carries deep traumatic memories of India's creation in 1947, and Vijayan is adept at teasing out the fraught, complicated social, political, and spiritual dynamics at play in each region. In the wake of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reelection in May 2019, writes the author, "the government has aggressively implemented policies that seek to remake India into a Hindu nation," thus again disenfranchising millions. Dozens of powerful, intimate stories of people affected traumatically by India's expedient geopolitical borders.
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Starred review from February 1, 2021
India's borders are vast, contested, and uncertain: some drawn by colonial-era British diplomats who had never seen the land they were defining, others the subject of sustained disagreement between India and one of its six bordering countries, and many created and enforced without regard for the well-being of those who live along them. Journalist and photographer Vijayan spent close to a decade traveling these borders and speaking to people whose lives have been shattered by generations of trauma, from the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed civilians by British troops at Amritsar, to the rapes and murders of Partition, to the current, ever-growing wave of Hindu nationalism. As Vijayan talks to cricket-playing children in Panitar (on the border of Bangladesh) and soldiers tasked with stopping smugglers from entering Rajasthan, her interest and affection for the people she encounters are palpable. So, too, is her anger. This book is, perhaps chiefly, a record of the caprice and savagery that accompanies governmental efforts to define and enforce their borders--a project that necessarily allows some to belong to a country, while violently excluding others. Midnight's Borders is fascinating, eloquent in its insights, and unflinching in its depiction of the dark side of nation-building.
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