Imagining Nations

 Midnight's Borders by Suchitra Vijayan

This is a hard-hitting book, one which raises more questions than it answers - what makes a country, does culture trump nationhood, how does one define empire, or freedom, and ultimately, do good fences make good neighbours, or do they just make unequal people?

Suchitra Vijayan, a journalist and a lawyer, travels 9000 miles along India's borders - through Afghanistan, Rajasthan, Punjab, Kashmir, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Assam.. documenting people and their stories at 'the frayed edges of the republic', counting the human toll of borders and the nation state. "Where you are born, what passport you hold, can shrink your world, cripple you and sometimes kill you," she says. Of course, most of the people in her stories have no conception of a thing called a passport. All they know is that Messrs. Durand, Radcliffe and McMahon drew lines on a map that changed their lives forever, dividing families, uprooting homes lived in for generations, disrupting ways of life unimaginably. 

The stories are hearbreaking, the ones from the eastern borders especially so, since these are stories being enacted now - in Assam and West Bengal, people who have lived in their homes for decades, whose families live across a line that exists only in maps, forced to prove their citizenship with documents they do not have, their futures dependent on arbitrary rulings by courts and lawyers they cannot afford. "They all look the same, speak the same," says a BSF guard in the Bangladesh-India border, "..that is why we need to keep a close watch." Vijayan calls this "the perfect distillation of Indian nationalism, a foundational myth about the nation's beginning and who belongs within its boundaries and who doesn't."

The partition vignettes from Punjab are less startling, mostly because the tragedy happened more than seven decades ago. Yet even here, Vijayan makes us realize that while we might know the history, and we have all read Train to Pakistan and watched Tamas, there still remain thousands of stories to be told - harrowing, soul-destroying, tragic.

Kashmir and Nagaland are different. For the first time in the book, we encounter people who do not want in, who believe they are not part of our country. Vijayan writes of a memorial outside Kohima dedicated to Khrisanisa Seyie, the first president of the Federal Government of Nagaland (!), with a plaque that says, "Nagas are not Indians; their territory is not part of the Indian union. We shall uphold and defend this unique truth at all costs and always.". The counter-insurgency operations impacted thousands of Naga families, and have left graves across the state, some of which have stark messages for us - a gravestone in a remote border with Burma reads "India killed my son." The Nagaland chapter is terribly disconcerting - it is a chapter in Indian history we have never learnt, and this, along with the Kashmir one are the ones that make us wonder the most about the Indian state - what makes us less of an empire than China or Russia?

Vijayan writes with passion and deep empathy. She is transparent about where her sympathies lie and is scathing about Modi and the Hindutva agenda that seeks to discriminate against a particular religion with state instruments like the NRC and CAA. But this book is not a political rant. It serves as witness to the large human cost of manmade borders and the narrative of the nation state. It is an important book, a complex one, one that as Indians, we need to read, if we want our nation state to mean anything more than lines on a map guarded by an armed force.