autobiographical elements in nampally road
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Answer:
The protagonist, Mira Kannadical, an English instructor at a local college in Hyderabad, the novel recreates some actual, historical events of 1970s in the city where the titular road emerges as almost a key character in the novel with several incidents occurring on Nampally Road. Mirroring the protagonist’s life, Meena Alexander returned to India in the 1970s to teach at the university in Hyderabad. The author makes a reference to the origin of Nampally Road in her autobiography Fault Lines. As the title of the memoir indicates, her sense of displacement or dislocation is such a strong sentiment, owing perhaps to the physical trajectory of her life, that she appears to struggle with lines, boundaries and environments in her work and self.
This pervasive sense of displacement is evidenced in Nampally Road, where much like the author, the main character Mira Kannadical returns with much optimism to make a new beginning in her homeland, extremely disaffected after her four-year study stint in England. Mira’s return coincides with preparations for the festivities surrounding the 60th birthday celebrations of Limca Gowda, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. These celebrations emerge as the main event in the novel, causing the metamorphosis of the quiet Nampally Road into a noisy, crowded street. With a
huge amount of state money being redirected towards these gaudy celebrations—
indicating a displaced sense of governance and power, which the protagonist struggles
to come to terms with, Mira says--
I returned to India determined to start afresh, make up a self that had some
continuity with what I was. It was my fond hope that by writing a few poems,
or a few prose pieces, I could start to stitch it all together: my birth in India a
few years after national independence, my colonial education, my rebellion
against the arranged marriage my mother had in mind for me, my years of
research in England.
The identity crisis, the need to belong, shattered by ground realities and turning into
dismay and perplexity are corroborated by Alexander’s own life in Fault Lines, where
she talks about the proximity of her faculty office to the prison in Hyderabad. Here
she was often forced to hear the cries of the prisoners when they were perhaps being
tortured. She refers to the moans of the prisoners getting mixed with the sounds in the
street—once again exemplifying the confusion of mixed identity—being unable to
distinguish one from the other yet being conscious of both. .When Alexander submits
the poems containing elements of police abuse to a local paper to get them published,
only blank empty spaces are printed thus highlighting government’s censorship of
content .
Answer:
The identity crisis, the need to belong, shattered by ground realities and turning into
dismay and perplexity are corroborated by Alexander’s own life in Fault Lines, where
she talks about the proximity of her faculty office to the prison in Hyderabad. Here
she was often forced to hear the cries of the prisoners when they were perhaps being
tortured. She refers to the moans of the prisoners getting mixed with the sounds in the
street—once again exemplifying the confusion of mixed identity—being unable to
distinguish one from the other yet being conscious of both. .When Alexander submits
the poems containing elements of police abuse to a local paper to get them published,
only blank empty spaces are printed thus highlighting government’s censorship of
content .