The Far Field
Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel The Far Field (2019) transports its reader to modern day India. This novel is a confession by thirty-year-old Shalini. She self-consciously tells her story as she leaves her native Bangalore in search of one man from Kashmir who touched her childhood. Her journey is a sort of coming-of-age even though she is in her mid-twenties when she sets off. Intertwined with her travels, Shalini reflects on her childhood and the lives of her mother and father. Ultimately her trip leads Shalini to the poverty, community, and brutality found in conflict-rife Kashmir. The Kashmir she finds wildly contrasts with her privileged background in southern India. Through Shalini’s first-person account, the reader grows with her, meets, loves and leaves the Kashmiri villagers whose paths she crosses, and then attempts to make sense of the fallout of her visit. Just as Shalini must sit with the failure of her personal pilgrimage to Kashmir, the reader too attempts to understand her careless choices and their awful consequences.
Shalini could never imagine the tragedy in store when her father challenges her to act near the novel’s introduction. In response to his imperative, “You must act,” she heads out on a solitary pilgrimage to find a man she has not seen in eleven years, who lives (she thinks) in a region she has never before visited (43). Her naïve impulsivity repeats itself time and again throughout the novel, and there were moments I, as reader, found it hard to bear. Yet, her story, and her character, felt authentic and honest. Her privilege blinds her to the impacts her impulsive behavior may have on the lives of others, and through the course of the novel the lesson is hard-learned.
The Far Field explicitly explores the complicated theme of privilege, and the ways in which people can carelessly harm the lives of others. Shalini’s confession seems in part a cautionary tale to those who wish to insert themselves into conflicts of which they themselves have no role. Perhaps Shalini should have recognized the complexity of the Kashmiri conflict into which she stumbles, yet she fails to do so. In attempting to right unjust situations, she inadvertently brings further terror to the lives of those she loves. After reading the final lines of Vijay’s novel, I found myself haunted by this question of privilege and appropriate ways to employ one’s position. After days of considering it, I haven’t worked it out, but the novel definitely succeeds in provoking plenty of thought on the subject.
One of the things I generally enjoy most about books is their ability to convey me to lands far beyond my home in which I face realities wildly different from my daily experience. The Far Field certainly delivers on that front. Vijay’s portrayal of Kashmir and the conflicts between the Kashmiri Muslims, Hindus and Indian Army, goaded me into further reading about the area. The contemporary nature of these conflicts, of which I am embarrassed to admit I was largely unaware, and the desperate nature of some of Vijay’s Kashmiri characters led me to appreciate the novel all the more, as it highlights a troubled area that is largely undiscussed in Western media. Yet, the lens through which Vijay’s novel explores Kashmir is entirely through Shalini’s outsider view as penned by Bangalore-native Vijay, and I wonder what Kashmiris make of it.
This novel deals with hard subjects as Shalini confesses her life’s secrets. It touches on mental illness, suicide, armed conflict, and more. While her life has always been financially comfortable, the reader comes to appreciate the troubling aspects of Shalini’s childhood and the trauma that she carries. This trauma, wrapped up in her relationship with her mother, is at the heart of Shalini’s choice to visit Kashmir and it seems to blind her to the possible results of her intrusion. There is, no doubt, a hubris in Shalini’s actions that The Far Field unravels, yet the novel really demonstrates the terrible cycle of trauma: one trauma becomes the catalyst for another and tragedy spreads. And this seems to be the rub. Shalini’s father tells her early in the book, “Without action, there is only waiting around for death” (43). Sometimes action, The Far Field illustrates, can inadvertently lead to great heartbreak. Perhaps, the novel suggests, confession is the only way to stop this tragic cycle. Shalini’s narrative ends and The Far Field leaves its reader to further unravel the questions it prompts.
Bibliography:
Vijay, Madhuri. The Far Field. Grove Press: New York, 2019.
