Books | Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India

The Question I Ask in the Book is “What Function Does a Nation Still Perform if it Has Consistently Failed to Offer the Most Basic of Human Dignity to its People?"

Given that you have been working with international refugees, how did you think of writing on people dislocated by borders in the Indian sub-continent, South Asia, to be more accurate?

Forced migration and the refugee crisis are inexplicably liked to the nation-state, exercise of violence in the name of territorial sovereignty and its borders.

The thread that runs through my work is a mediation on citizenship, what it means to be free and resist. We cannot overlook the link between the often violent creation, occupation, and maintenance of borders and the production of refugee movements, statelessness, or manufacturing subjects stripped of citizenship rights.

When I decided to travel to India’s borders, I had just returned from Afghanistan—a place I had known and wanted to study for a long time. It took me another 10 years to get to Afghanistan, and in the intervening decade, I lived in occupied lands and war zones. Places often described as ‘contentious.’ I lived in The Hague, working for the War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and later in Arusha, Tanzania, with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I lived in Cairo the year leading up to the Arab Spring. There, I ran the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in 2008 to provide resources for the more than 5,000 Iraqi families who fled the invasion of Iraq. Amidst the fear of being shut down and regular visits from the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence services, we served close to 600 Iraqi families.

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Whether it was the testimonies I have read from Rwanda and Bosnia or the st