Nampally Road

NAMPALLY ROAD: A PERSONAL, POLITICAL AND COLLECTIVE DISPLACEMENT WITHIN THE HOMELAND

Dr. Shashikant Mhalunkar, P. G. Dept. of English, B.N.N. College, Bhiwandi, Dist. Thane

Abstract: Fiction has been a major tool to articulate the personal trauma and social crisis as well as communal unrest for centuries. It has been used by writers to chronicle their personal experiences, which ultimately can be applied to the masses in which the writer lived. In the era of Postcolonization and Globalization writers have been incessantly narrating their personal experiences. Meena Alexander’s novel, Nampally Road chronicles the social and political turmoil in the postcolonial India where the writer traces the rise of neo-feudalism after the colonial rule. The natives suffer at the hands of political leaders and experience trauma of political dislocation, issues of identity crisis and gender in the parochial social cryptograph. The present paper attempts to explore the personal, political, and collective displacement of the subjects in Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road in which her female protagonists suffer personally and also collectively along with other sufferers in the novel. She explicates the issues of Indian identity in the face of the decline of democratic institution. Social trauma, political unrest, social turmoil, cultural hybridity and psychological trauma at personal, social and mass levels are the major issues of her fiction. Alexander documents the social scenario of Independent India during the advent of Emergency through her novel. Also, her narrative deals with the trauma of women who are placed in the alien land. These women explore their feminine identities in the search of home and ‘self’. Further, Alexander explicates the complexities of human lives in the transnational space in the phase of social turmoil and politicalunrest.

Key Words: Dislocation, identity-crisis, political unrest.

Meena Alexander is a diasporic writer whose writings chronicle the social and political turmoil in the postcolonial India where she traces the rise of neo- feudalism after the decline of colonial rule. The natives suffer at the hands of political leaders and experience trauma of political dislocation, issues of identity crisis and gender in the parochial social cryptograph. She explicates the issues of Indian identity in the face of the decline of democratic institution. Social trauma, political unrest, social turmoil, cultural hybridity and psychological trauma at personal level are the major issues of her fiction. Mathai aptly critiques the narratives of Alexander as documentation by a dislocated subject. Her narratives articulate personal and collective sensibilities. Shechronicles:

Meena Alexander is a diasporic Indian writer of novels firmly situated in time and space, novels which are concerned with the  concrete and immediate inequalities and injustices prevalent in India, since they question values prevalent in Indian society today, social and political structures, and the erosionofdemocraticinstitutionsasthey

investigate Indian identity. (Mathai: 1996: 437)

Meena distances herself from India, from family and her ancestral roots. These issues force her to recast linkages that work within the ethnic and cultural complexities of a diasporic world. The diasporic experiences that the readers come across in her narratives are her own lived experiences. Also one can see multiple visions that the writer has in exploring her ‘self’ and her characters. Dolores Herrero points out, “Her writings reflect her own lived diasporic experiences: on one hand those of uprooting, exile, trauma, separation and loneliness, but on the other those of hope and a privileged multiple vision that can alone transcend rigid national and cultural barriers. (Herrero: 2009: 257) These are the major concerns of every mobile subject in the post globalizationperiod.

Alexander’s novella, Nampally Road (1991), triggers the socio-political unrest of the era when Emergency was declared by Indira Gandhi, the first woman prime minister of free India. The prime minister of India and the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, in the text, enjoy autocracy creating a displacement for their own natives. Indianswhoarefreefromthecolonialrulearemadeto

experience neo-colonialism at the hands of the political leaders. Meena Alexander observes political displacement among the natives of India due to the infliction of Emergency where the basic human rights are denied to people. As an outsider the narrator, Mira observes these inhumanities. Subsequently, being an Indian she experiences the pangs of displacement as observes the atrocities done by the politically dominant personalities against the commons. The neo-colonialism in Nampally Road denies freedom to people and enslaves them. Also as a modern text, it touches upon the issues of nationality, race, gender and postcoloniality. Rebecca Sultana rightly articulates:

“Alexander’s writing disturbs and reconfigures the representations of the nation by situating her novels and personal narrative upon the politics of displacement. This displacement is figured in terms of a diasporic feminist vision that allows for a questioning of patriarchal narratives and identity. In doing so, her texts also rewrite normative identity categories such as those of nation, race, gender, and postcoloniality. (Sultana: 1999:62)

The novel is divided into ten small chapters chronicling the experiences of the female protagonist, Mira Kannadical, a Diaspora subject who sojourns from the international space, England to her homeland. Also, it records the experiences and observations narrated from the lenses of a female Diaspora writer who has returned to her native after four years’ stay in the West. Mira is a creative writer who is sensitive about the happenings, injustice and suffering around her. Further, her higher education in the land of the colonizers caters her strength to rebel against the Indian institution of arranged marriages. As a Diaspora subject who has just returned from international space struggles to reinvent her identity with the package of her diasporic experiences. Mira finds herself in the socially and politically unrest city. Both the acts of Mira-the selection of Hyderabad and rebel against the arranged marriage indicate that Mira is rebel who is trying to discover her ‘self’ and the society in the postglobalization. Alexander chronicles the experiences of a female subject who is both a social rebel and a romantic lover. The text mingles the harsh realitiesof

everyday life with fantasy of the Third World space. Makarand Paranjape captures this tone of the Diaspora narrative:

It is a city of riots, senseless violence, state repression, rape and fantasy – in short, a nightmarish place. It is not that none of these happen in reality, but that much else also does; in Alexander’s book, nothing else seems to happen.

This lack of proportion suggests that Alexander has succumbed to the easy temptation of painting in pre-selected lurid colours the geography of a Third World place. (Paranjape: 1992: 30)

In England the Mira gets freedom from the cultural and ethnic bond of her nation. As a free Diaspora subject she attempts to define herself in the West. Dislocation and homelssness are the common tenets traced in her stay in Nottingham. Even she tries to discover her own self juxtaposing it with the culture of the host nation. She articulates her dislocation and loneliness through her migratory experiences and experimentation that she undertakes to discover her fractured identity. The shift in location makes her to have different experiments. Shesays:

When I began my English sojourn I found myself at a great disadvantage as far as the loneliness of life was concerned. I suffered from dislocation. Somehow I had not gathered into myself the resolute spirit needed for solitary study. In my own way I slowly picked up courage. The first year, rather than immerse myself in faded volumes of PMLA, I conducted experiments on myself. I went to all-night parties with ear- splitting music and blinding lights. In daylight, in company, I tried to eat with my left hand. (Alexander: 1991:29)

Mira’s dissident is evident in her act of returning to her homeland and picking up the occupation of a teacher and writer that provides her a scanty income. This projects her rebellious attitude against the set norms of Diaspora community which is greedy for job opportunities abroad. After her research she would have settled in England but she prefers to come back and settle in India, that too, in theperipheral

domain of South India. This indicates her adoration for her home culture and ethnicity. Still, one can trace Mira as a confluence of East and West-she projects her Indian ethnicity as she comes back and stays in Hyderabad and her rebellious attitude towards the arranged Indian marriage system, her love affair and premarital sex with her lover, Ramu, projects the influence of Western culture onher.

Throwing away the luxurious and lavish life in an advanced nation, she prefers the life in peripheries in India-a nation that denies her the basic human rights due to Emergency. She does not feel comfortable in England. The strain of being lonely and dislocated makes her to move to her motherland. In her anguish and solitude she decides to return to India where she hopes, she would be free from her anxiety. Her return to native is to discover her ‘self’ among the Indian masses and social flow. The narrator also observes the cultural markers, which are, in a way, markers of multiculturalism reminding people the colonial rule in Hyderabad long after Indian Independence. The huge clock outside the clinic has the painted queen on it which makes the narrator explore the Indian space ranging from the Gulmarg Valley to the international space- the Thames. Mira connects this locational shift of Lady Victoria and Mira herselfrightly:

The arms of the clock were buried in the skirts of a queen, a painted lady. VICTORIA, it said beneath her in bright silver. Her cheeks were like apples from the Gulmarg Valley. Her skirts were gray like the fog on the Thames. The apothecary had inherited the clock from his uncle, who had been Compounder to the Resident. (Alexander: 1991: 18-19)

Ramu, the friend and love of Mira, also represents mobile subject who visits multiple locations. His love for the homeland is evident as he discards the prestigious Rhodes scholarship and prefers a modest grant from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi for his Ph. D. programme. Ramu is born in Kerala, stays in Hyderabad for his job as a teacher at Sona Nivas College, Hyderabad and for his Ph. D. programme studies in Delhi. He has a strong patriotic feeling for the people who suffer at the hands of the autocratic rulers in independent India. Here, Ramu shows the impact of his

grandfather who had been an associate of Gandhi  during Freedom Fighting Movement. During Emergency, he takes part in protests and reacts vehemently against the unjust rule and decisions of the government. In doing so, he experiences imprisonment also for several times. Through his readings of Carl Marx and Habermas he protests against the unjust rule of Limca Gouda. Emergency turns the democratic leaders into dictators. The political leaders took the stance of autocrats and exploited the commons. In Hyderabad, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Limca Gouda behaves as the Nizam, the dictator and ruler of Hyderabad instead of his parental role as the representative and caretaker of thepeople.

Further, Mira forms her cultural self through her involvement in the struggle against the merciless political leaders and the shameless, corrupt policemen. In her active participation with Ramu and the locals against the prevailing injustice, she discovers her new identities. Mira performs a number of roles-writer, teacher, social activist and a lover-which create confusion and entanglement in her character. As a writer she desires to write but she fails to write anything. She attempts to write and define her role and identity in relation to the country that is undergoing serious social and civilturmoil.

The issue of identity crisis gets more complicated further as Mira tries to teach western classics and writers like Wordsworth. These western classics no longer suit the situation. The social upheaval around her disturbs her so much that she fails to explore her identity as a teacher. No doubt, the novel is set in India, but Indian culture is has been viewed from the lenses of western culture. Mira does not part with the western culture. On the other hand, she tries to transmit her knowledge of western literature to the political situation in Hyderabad. Her ideas exhibit the amalgamation of both Indian and English cultures. Further, this affects her expression of identity. Mira’s cultural and lingual hybridity is significantly captured by Shilpa Dave. Sheexpounds:

Mira’s search for universal language translates into a vision with multiple possibilities and opens up identity and culture to various influences, not just to a monolithic Western culture.Alexander

depicts concepts of difference in her novel and supports pluralism as a means of reconciling an individual to a community....Writing becomes a way of wearing her past and present into a presentable form that enacts her identity....The influence of environment or culture is integrated into the vision of the individual with the intent of modifying the worldview into an all-encompassing cultural society. The essence, identity becomes multicultural instead of unicultural. (Dave: 2001: 17)

As time passes Mira gets involved with the people around her. Her routine with Durgabai, the Little Mother, Ramu, her lover and the young students of Sona Nivas College showcases that she has mixed up with the surroundings in Hyderabad as a native subject. For her life becomes meaningful in the company of these people. But the brutalities of Limca Gowda and his Ever Ready Men clash her idealist concept of nationalism after Independence. The corrupt politicians distort the message and goal of founders of the country. The social turmoil pushes every innocent and common person into identity crisis in his/her nativeland.

The novel reaches to climax as a poor woman from a distant village near Hyderabad comes to see the most popular movie, Isak Katha at Sagar Talkies along with her husband. After the night show, when the couple is returning to the house of one of their relatives, Rameeza Be is raped by a gang of drunken policemen repeatedly. Her husband who rushed her help is brutally beaten and murdered by them. This shows that the common people are not safe in their homeland.The advent of Emergency in India has sacked the basic rights of citizens. They find themselves dislocated. Further, this act triggers a series of violent events in the city. The rape of Rameeza is a turning point in Mira’s life and personality as well. She experiences the pangs of Rameeza by touching her. Rameeza’s rootlessness and the fractured identity eventually transcends into the character of the protagonist. The feminist sensibility in Mira is best articulated by Dolores Herrero. Sheopines:

Mira will eventually transcend her ineffectual fractured vision of things in order to become part of a female continuum,a

sisterhood that defies patriarchy and culturally imposed conventions, and heals the wounds of silence and oppression for so long inflicted upon women Diasporic

people cannot possibly have a singular and unified vision, which in turn implies, to quote Mira’s own words, that ‘the self is always two.’ Always broken...given the world as it is, there’s nowhere people like us can be whole. (Alexander: 1991:92)

Further, Mira is more attached to the women in the novel than to Ramu. She admires and assists him for his patriotic work but, at the same time, she finds herself more connected to the Little Mother for the care she takes of the poor and the needy; and she also gets more attached to Rameeza Be for her sufferings. These women suffer while they fight for their dignity by risking their well-being and peace. Mira’s attachment with the suffering and struggling women is more realist and urgent than her love for Ramu. The women portrayed in the text represent different domains of society, class and educational statuses but they are tied together by the feminist ethics of care which based on mutual understanding and sympathy. They cross their social, cultural and educational borders and help each other. In a way it is a collective catharsis one can see in them. Alexander introduces another female Diaspora subject in the face of a Canadian woman, Laura Rebaldo with her merciless and non-affectionate husband, Henry. For Laura Hyderabad is an international space, far away from her homeland, Canada. Her stay in Hyderabad pushes her in periphery, homelessness, loss of identity and nostalgia. The narrator chronicles Laura’s dislocatedstate:

Laura was gripped by a desire to flee Hyderabad. Henry might have had something to do with it. Sometimes he beat her about the ears so violently she was forced shivering and half naked onto the balcony that jutted out from theirflat.

Laura’s three sisters were in Canada. They wrote her letters filled with news of shopping malls that were palaces of chrome and plastic, crammed with glittering things to buy,cartsthatyoupushedthroughaislesas

music rang in your ears. (Alexander: 1991: 43)

Globalization has facilitated the mobility of people from country to country. Subsequently, globalization has brought loneliness and frustration to the migrants. Alexander throws light upon the loneliness and isolation of Laura as a Diaspora person in India. Her life in Hyderabad is like a nightmare as she shrinks into marginality and loss of identity with all her rights taken away by her husband, Henry. Mira captures the marginality and dislocation of Laura. She enunciates:

Laura’s bedroom was very dark. The thin red curtains she had patched with darker material let in little light. What came in was tinted with the color of the cloth and made bedding, dresser, and chair seem overblown, part of a colonized movie in which the heroine, forced into a red light district, finds it impossible to move out and stand there, rigid and forlorn, half acting, half feeling her way to the part of her life that had led her up the rickety steps into the darkened red room. (Alexander: 1991: 44)

Gradually, the social turmoil becomes Mira’s personal trauma as she is unable to teach the Western poet, Wordsworth. The gang rape of Rameeza Be by the police disturbs her routine chores. The romantic literature clashes with the harsh realities of life around her. She gets dislocated from her job of a teacher as she fails to explore and explain the poetry of Wordsworth. “I could not force my thoughts round to the Wordsworth poem I had to teach in an hour’s time. All those words on a page were so far away. What did he know of our world, our pain?” (Alexander: 1991: 41) Further, Mira rebels against studying Wordsworth in new India. While discussing with Ramu she states the irrelevance of studying Wordsworth in the prevailing social turmoil. Juxtaposing the cultural and social nuances Miravocalises:

I value Wordsworth for his great privacy of mind and his power. For his illusions about memory. For his voice so refined that we can listen intently and then say, no our lives are not like that. We live with turmoil and disturbance, with the abuse of law. But as a

young man he knew a little about that too. (Alexander: 1991: 54)

Further, Globalization also triggers migration of people from one nation to the other for religious purposes and in the search of solace. Lord Krishna, the Hindu god, has been a sole cause to attract a number of devotees across the world. These devotees are the temporal migrants who come to India singing the bhajanas in praise of Lord Krishna. This migration is an attempt to escape from the harsh realities of their lives. Here, religion provides a refuge for the escapists. Mira documents:

Each year hundreds of devotees came to Hyderabad from as far away as California and Perth. They dressed in thin saffron clothing and sang in the streets, sometimes entering the college to try to gain a few followers. Mostly the students just stared at them or engaged them in chitchat about Capitalism and the Wrongs of Religion. The devotees, often men and women who had fled their difficult parents and intransigent worlds, smiled docilely and repeated truths about Krishna’s love, which coming from their mouths hung like innocent butterflies in our air, weightless, irresolute. (Alexander: 1991: 52-53)

Globalization also showcases the hasty life of the modern people who fly from their native country to some other nation and after some period of time they return to their homeland. Like any other postglobalization subject Mira takes a number of air voyages as multiple modes of migration. Mira’s sojourns make her aware about the uncertainties of life. Like a migratory subject in Neo-Diaspora, she takes into account every movement that she has undertaken in traversing from India and back. Further, she traces life in her itineraries. Miracomments:

Our running had life of its own, as if the haste and breathlessness were the world entire. I had felt the same uncertainty in the long air voyages that took me away and brought me back to India when I was a student. Worlds suspended, lives closing up, hanging fire. (Alexander: 1991:55)

Even in her own homeland, the narrator feels dislocated due to the social turmoil around her.The coercive power of the Chief Minister, Limca Gowda, his Ever Ready Men, the corrupt, drunkard and rapist policemen, infliction of Emergency and the whimsical cycle of nature push her to uncertainties, discomfort and dislocation. Mira surmises, “I had slept through the night, untroubled by dreams, but I had a curious sense of dislocation when I woke up. Where was I?” (Alexander: 1991:55)

Further, the gang rape of Rameeza Be invites angst and revolt by the commons which resultsinto burning Gowliguda Police Station where she was raped and her husband brain beaten and killed mercilessly by the policemen. The women rescue Rameeza Be and take her away. Rameeza Be also represents a subject which is dislocated from her hometown and her own people. Even her language is unintelligible for the narrator. Mira observes, “She made little whispers and short cries as if she had come from another country...” (Alexander: 1991: 79) Further, the gang rape on Rameeza Be pushes her to periphery that she finds herself dislocated within her ownself.

Mira, in this way, becomes an active participant in the social turmoil taking place in Hyderabad. She feels the angst and suffering of each female character- Durgabai Gokhale, Laura Rebaldo, Rameeza Be, Maitreyi and Rosamma-by sharing their burden and exploring her multiple identities. Mira dislocates her ‘self’ and attempts to relocate it with the other females in the narrative. In this way, the personal narrative becomes social and collective as it envelops the concern of Mira’s lot. Dolores Herrero aptlyremarks:

Yet, this lack of unity does not leave the narrator empty and helpless, since it is the infinitely layered identity that all diasporic people, and diasporic women in particular, have that allows Mira to have several visions through several pairs of eyes, and thus become part of a female communal project.

Mira’s leap is no longer a leap into dark, but her fusion and transition ‘from one woman’s body into another. (Herrero: 2009: 262)

Nampally Road deals mainly with the discourse on nation, nationality and dislocation from the narrator’s point of view, who is basically Indian but a migrant and mobile female with a postcolonial perspective. From a subaltern stance Mira attempts to discover her female identity and Indian social ethnicity. In doing so she bears many burdens compelled upon her by society, political system and parochial codes as Terry Eagleton rightly remarks, “The plight of women in such societies, forced as they are to assume many of its most wretched burdens.” (Eagleton: 1996:205)

The novel depicts the struggle of Mira, a creative genius against the political injustice, corruption and oppression by the politicians. Unaware she takes the stance of a rival and becomes one with the masses in their revolt against the political rule. This rivalry between the politicians and the creative writers is best epitomized by Rushdie. He documents:

‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth. (Rushdie: 2010: 14)

Therefore, at personal level, the characters like Mira, Rameeza, Ramu and Laura experience displacement. But as they share the pangs of other characters who are suppressed at the hands of the politicians. They showcase collective displacement though they are in free India. It is the political strategy of the then rulers which pushes them to undergo political displacement. Nampally Road, thus becomes a document of personal, communal, collective and political displacement.

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