SM: I am curious to know why you have written two versions of the book—US and Indian versions, with the former coming out in the US shortly. What is the difference between the two?

SV: I want to make it clear that there are not two versions of the book. I wrote one manuscript, and the stories remain the same. However, the book has two publishers. One immediate difference is the style guide that is unique to them. The North American and European edition, for instance, explains the political and social history that is familiar to many of us but not to the other audience. Rather than two versions of the book, it would be appropriate to call it two different manuscript edit experiences.

I started working on the US/ UK manuscript edits after the Feb 23rd Delhi Pogrom, which was followed by intimidation, false charges, and arrests of dissenting voices. Given the gravity of the stories and the subject matter, both editors read the manuscript for accuracy. Everything was triple-checked - footnotes, citations, sources, and quotations. As I was finalizing the US / UK manuscript edits, Dr. Anand Teltumbde was arrested. When I started work on final India edits, Umar Khalid was arrested. For a long time now, Indian publishers, media houses, and universities have allowed right-wing fundamentalist groups to dictate what should be taught, reported, published, or pulped. For ex, after facing censorship, and being hounded in 2014 by local caste-based and Hindu religious groups, author Perumal Murgan in a recent interview, said, “There is a censor within me now.” Most recently, journalist Prashant Kanojia was arrested for a tweet. Journalist Siddique Kappan remains incarcerated and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act while on his way to report on the Hathras rape and murder.

It’s a disorienting time when your library or what books you read can become evidence of sedition or proof that you are an ‘anti-national’.

For instance, I cited academic sources and a handful of reports for a sentence that said - “The BSF is a bureaucratic, corrupt and opaque institution.” So the other difference is that the Indian version has more footnotes and citations. It was an exercise in finding citations for what I witnessed.

What I was most concerned about and still am are the people in the book and their safety. We made a last-minute decision to remove a photograph. Many of the stories didn’t make it to the book because it became dangerous to identify people. Some people later chose not to be included because they feared repercussions, especially as the NRC process started playing out. I left a few names out in the acknowledgment, worrying if it might direct more trouble towards them.

SM: Rabindranath Tagore famously wrote that “Nationalism is an effort to obtain control over weak neighboring states (and) is a form of imperialism that ultimately destroys humanity.” You talk about the concept of unity from “Kashmir to Kanyakumari” being taught to you at school. We have all grown up with that concept, but you realize that there is simply no common ground between the people, except a shared border. During your travels, did you feel that nationalism in India could exist if the arbitrary borders created for ease of governance did not exist?

SV: I read a lot of Greek tragedies when I traveled. And when reading tragedies, you quickly encounter deus-ex-machina, a plot device employed by Greek playwrights. Here actors who played gods were brought onto the stage using a mechanical device like a crane to decide the outcome. These ‘Gods’ or “supernatural beings” were unexpectedly introduced, dropped on the stage, and into the plot to resolve the conflict. Or find immediate reconciliation to a complex problem. For instance, in Euripides' Medea, deus ex machina is the sun god Helios’ chariot, that Medea jumps to escape to Athens. In Alcestis, towards the end, Heracles shows up and saves her from death. For me, nationalism is a deus ex machina, an internally inconsistent device thrust often violently amid irreconcilable histories of violence and belonging.

There are two phrases I want to flag from the Birth of Tragedy - “having been adequately tormented by fate” …..“granted freedom once he had been satisfactorily flayed and scarred.” While Neitzche discusses Oedipus in that paragraph, the phrases also aptly describe the predicament of nations violently birthed in South Asia.

About the question of nationalism, I have always found Jinnah's phrase, “India is a subcontinent nationalities, ” and not quite a nation, an interesting point of entry for this conversation. India, the country cobbled together hurriedly, is a geopolitical myth. Babasaheb Ambedkar, in ‘The Grammar of Anarchy,’ speech to the Constituent Assembly in 1949, says,

“I remember the days when politically-minded Indians resented the expression ‘the people of India.’ They preferred the expression “the Indian nation.” I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realise that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us. For then only we shall realise the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realising the goal. The realisation of this goal is going to be very difficult…The castes are anti-national.”

To see India through the lens of nationalism is not only a “great delusion”; it also requires a certain degree of suspension of disbelief. The crime against people is never asking them who the Indian nation is for. This, I believe, has had profound implications. As I traveled between 2013 - 2019, India and the region transformed. As I write in the book, India struggles to hold all its people, a country in the middle of great fissuring and churning. I am not just talking about violence and majoritarian hate. I am talking about the breakdown of the social fabric, loyalty, and trust.

SM: The book reads like a Bildungsroman. A journey of education from the border post to border post as it were.  How have you grown from the experience of writing this book, and what has changed for you?

SV: For me, writing has always been a way to make sense of the world. I write because I am curious. I write to learn. In the book, I say that the book is "a return home....after being away for more than a decade, I was coming back to a place I no longer recognized." In that sense, yes, I went looking for answers, but the questions also changed over the journey. I started traveling in India in 2013, and the book ends with the NRC protests. The years I traveled were also the years that India was remade in ways no one would have predicted. What I saw was an India transforming before me into a Hindu Rashtra. The journey changed me; it gave me political and moral clarity to always stand with those fighting for their people’s freedom and dignity.

SM: Writing this book took you much longer than you anticipated, but it also helped it become that much more relevant as so much of the content you speak of is the living history of the past 3-4 years. How different is the final book from what you envisaged at the beginning? 

SV: The work started as a photography project; I imagined this to be a scrapbook of encounters, poetry, and vignettes. The book came later. When I look at the first version of this scrapbook, now it looks and feels vacuous. A writer’s role is to respond to the politics of their time.

So the stories grew and became the book we have today.

I wrote and rewrote the book many times over. The language changed, the theorization, academic language had to be excised. The language had to become lite. I wanted the reader to walk with me, see through my eyes, and sit next to me. I wanted them to be angry when they encountered injustice, smile at moments of happiness, and see love in impossible places. I don't know if I have managed to do that.

SM: The title of the book has an echo of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and, of course, Nehru’s "Tryst with Destiny" speech in which he refers to India the nascent nation-state’s midnight hour. The subtitle of your book is ‘A People’s History of Modern India’. Are you deliberately pointing out the contradiction between the arbitrariness of India being defined by its boundaries at one point in ‘time’ while the people’s history doesn’t coincide with that? So, is there a deliberate play on the differences between the history of the map and the history of the people?

SV: Jawaharlal Nehru’s 'Tryst with Destiny' speech embodied young India’s grand ambitions and aspired to a nation made of men and women equally protected by the law. Three hundred million people who had been considered less than subjects under the British rule, divided for years by religion, language, class, and caste, would all be united under one book: India’s revolutionary Constitution by Babasaheb Ambedkar. While Nehru was still declaring this victory, the slaughter began. Not everyone rejoiced in these new freedoms. Not everyone lived to see its promises.

More importantly, as Ambedkar would argue, the political revolution was never accompanied by a social revolution. He writes about how when the Constitution was adopted, "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality. In politics, we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote, and one vote, one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?"

The ‘revolutionary’ Constitution not only created a social world made of contradictions, but it very soon became the tool of suppressing dissent, deployed laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and Public Safety Act (PSA) in Kashmir.

Here, 'Midnight' functions as a moment of violent birth and perhaps the foundational violence that becomes codified in various ways, especially in the bodies of people farthest away from power.

The people's history is always a map of belonging, one that has no resemblance to the cartographic history that is essential for nations to exist.

SM: I am intrigued by the stories of Natasha who lives in New York and Ali who lives in no man’s land. Both seem to be uncertain about their ‘national’ identity. Would you say that everyone who was affected by the demarcation of the borders, is effectively living in no man’s land wherever in the world they may be? 

SV: We are all affected by borders, border-making policies, and practices. I don’t think it’s just Natasha or Ali. The nation-State, the carceral citizenship regimes, and the militarization of everyday life all create various no-man's lands. I feel deeply conflicted by these imposed identities. I was an Indian citizen yesterday; today, after living half my life away from home, I became a citizen of another Nation. What community do I or any of us truly belong to?

From the Empire’s epoch to the nation-state, border making is fundamentally a political project that creates, sustains, and reinforces inequality. It is meant to manufacture an underclass of rightless subjects. In the age of erosion of citizenship rights, a kind of ongoing attrition against human rights, civil liberties, and in the case of India, an accelerated dilution of fundamental rights - I believe that political alienation, fragmented belongings, and a sense of unmooring are pervasive.