"The Far Field" by Madhuri Vijay

ASIATIC: IIUM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, 2023

This article examines the trope of the 'missing person' in the literature about Kashmir and argues, by taking Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field (2019) as an example, how the trope allows the examination of a multilayered history of violence. The article problematises the idea of visibility and invisibility of the missing/abducted/hidden/underground people during conflict and suggests that these figures can be read as metaphors for personal and collective trauma and loss. By triangulating three coordinates in Kashmiri context-violence, trauma, and invisibility-the essay argues that a missing person can be emblematic of memories of trauma, negation of humanity, violation of body, and public complicity in institutional violence. By foregrounding Shalini's journey to recover the missing people, the novel underpins the "rot remains" of a society afflicted with violence and state apathy. Within the framework of trauma theory in the postcolonial context, the essay shows how the focus of Vijay's narrative of Kashmiri people's trauma is shifted from speech to body. The emphasis on the body contributes to a compelling narration of trauma by conflating land and people.

The scene at the Srinagar airport was as fraught as it was baffling outside. The Kashmir policemen lolled in the chairs, one stood up lazily as the passengers filed in, with a careless point of the baton he instructed anyone a shade lighter to go to the immigration desk. For a good fifteen minutes I tried to establish my Kashmiri-hood (or –ness, or –yet), although my dress and face did not hint otherwise. My spoken Kashmiri meant nothing to the person behind the desk handing me a pen to fill the form, " no big deal, you must have learnt it, America is always sending spies here ". Finally he let me go. He was as weary of doing his work, as I was of his unusual zealousness. I wormed my way out of the passenger flurry. The reception area was almost empty. The driver of the taxi-cab gave a muffled overview of the events over the last month, clicking his tongue ever too often, his weather-beaten face puckered, shoulders drooping; he chewed forcefully at the cigarette end. Leaving the heavily barricaded and military ridden ramparts of the airport, the city began zipping past, the taxi-cab was too fast for the road but then there was zero traffic. Piles of garbage lay strewn, licked by an occasional cow, a hungry dog rummaged, around what is usually a relatively clean part of the city. Since visitors enter Kashmir along this way, the administration walks an extra mile to keep it looking good or too good, for a place that has been war-torn since 2 decades. Everywhere you looked around in the valley unsightly military installations, haphazard concrete contraptions in other words known as new buildings, dilapidated roads, unending smoky traffic jams, and countless razed structures rammed into the hearts of its denizens. Driving through the city of Lal Chowk, called the heart of Kashmir, everything was eerily quiet. Globs of trash, stones, garbage bags, and a forlorn shoe stuck to the sidewalk. A few boys lingered near the lamp post, behind them a bigger group noisily advanced from the alley, their fists, flailing above. The Indian troops patrolled on, their AK-47's gleaming. The embattled bunker oozed into the road, a bottleneck that doubled as a checkpoint, nozzles of guns peered out through tiny slits, trained. A blue-grey armored vehicle stood on alert with a soldier atop, machine gun ready. Sensing danger, the driver sped up, leaving behind the growing noise of slogans. Looking back a safe distance away, the crowd had spilled into the main road, the troopers running towards them and photojournalists descending from the sides. A few minutes later gunshots rang through air. Such scenes repeated over and over throughout my stay and continue as of writing this. In June this year, a fresh uprising began after the killing of a young boy, Tufail Mattoo, in down town Srinagar by the Indian police. It is widely believed that the boy was innocent and not part of protest against the extrajudicial killings by the Indian army in Machil, a border village, which the troops were trying to quell when a tear gas shell fatally hit Tufail. The

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018

Studies in Documentary Film, 2021

Questions of political allegiance between India and Pakistan have turned Kashmir into one of the most militarised zones in the world. Although antagonism between India and Pakistan vis-à-vis Kashmir is predicated on territorial disputes, the Kashmir Valley since the end of the British rule in India in 1947 has struggled with the contentious issues of identity, freedom, armed intrusions, often resulting in mass murders, and illegal arrests of its people. Although independent documentary film-makers address these issues, and thus offer a complicated history and politics of Kashmir, Iffat Fatima, perhaps as the only independent woman documentary film-maker based in Kashmir, engages a wide-ranging issues including enforced disappearances, politics of memory/remembrance, resistance, neo-national ideologies, ‘states of exception’ in her films. Unlike the usual male dominated conflict zones, protests in Kashmir are characterized by its resisting and protesting women. In boldly articulating Kashmiri experiences through her independent films, Fatima foregrounds women’s participation as an essential aspect of Kashmiri protest producing different outcomes and relations. Situating herself in such a precarious space, Fatima in the interview at hand discusses her filmic self, her engagement with resistance movements in Kashmir, and women’s protest movements in Kashmir.

South Asian Studies, 2018

It will be quite some time before Kashmir Valley returns to complete normalcy, but the picture of an impending apocalypse as being attempted to be depicted by Pakistan or some of the Indian media is completely overhyped and far from the reality prevailing on the ground as this eyewitness narrative reveals. The biggest challenge will be to deradicalise a society that has systematically been radicalised and Islamised during the last 30 years with the connivance of the State leadership.