Nampally Road

by Meena Alexander

This is the story of Mira Kannadical who lives simultaneously in a private world of lyrical intensity and a public world of violence and torture. Mira who hopes to lead an ideal life after her return home from England finds her India teeming with confusion and unrest. Realising the futility of her desire to lead a Utopian life in a world of harsh realities, Mira turns away from poetry and looks to people around her to help define herself Durgabai, practical and devoted to her patients; old Swami Chari, preaching that the world s sufferings are only an illusion; and her rebellious lover Ramu, urging her towards dangerous political action.

Genres: Fiction, India, Indian Literature, Historical Fiction, Asian American

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Meena Alexander was an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She was the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meena Alexander is known as an Indian feminist writer who has produced a modern commentary on Mary Wollstonecraft's The Vindication of the Rights of Women. Her novella Nampally Road is a look at the fight for independence in India following the partition of Pakistan. Told through the eyes of a repatriated graduate student named Mira Kannadical, Nampally Road details the struggles various groups in the new nations faced while coming to terms with their national identity.

Mira Kannadical is an English graduate student studying the works of Wordsworth. Following the Indian-Pakistan partition, she receives a grant to teach and study in a university of her home city of Hyderabad and returns there to live in the home of Durgabai, the mother of a colleague. At age twenty five, Mira is impressionable on the events occurring around her. She attempts to impart the wisdom of classic poets to her students, but they are more interested in the generational fight for a more independent nation, granting rights to women and religious minorities. As a result, Mira's teaching and writing career are put on hold as she decides which side to join in the events unfolding around her.

For a short novella, Alexander has developed a diverse cast of characters. Mira's lover Ramu has joined the push for independence and encourages her to take a more political stance in her life. Durgabai, also known as Little Mother, earned her medical degree when India was still under British rule and is a respectable obstetrician in her city and surrounding areas. Rameeza is an innocent victim of police violence in the struggle and embodies the push for increased women's rights in the Muslim section of India, which usually treats women as second class citizens. Mira has returned to this India in search of her roots after attending university in England. She had not planned on being a part of revolutionary struggle but the events and cast of characters allows her to come to grips of who she is in modern Indian nation.

Alexander employs diverse prose to reel readers in from the first pages. Readers meet Mira and Ramu as their daily lives on Nampally Road unfold. The descriptions of the time and place are distinct and it is easy to feel a part of the bustle of the busy city center of Hyderabad. Even though the novel is meant to focus on this one street, one can see how this modern center is the nexus for the revolutionary happenings occurring around them. For a poignant novella, Nampally Road reads quickly as Alexander moves from event to event and describes each setting to its fullest.

Before western readers were treated to Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, Meena Alexander paved the way with her feminist essays and novellas. Using luscious prose, Nampally Road was a treat to read even though it is short in length. As with any historical novel, I came away knowing more about the time and place, and enjoyed reading Alexander's work. I hope to read more of her writing in the future, and rate Nampally Road 4.5 shining stars.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Of all the reviews I'm ashamed of having written, the one for A Fine Balance has taught me the most. Excuses such as youth and inexperience would carry more weight if I didn't see the same willful disregard for history, politics, and the incompatibility of Truth with Entertainment espoused by those two to three times my age. The world's grown even smaller in the technological sense of informational networks than it was when I first opened Mistry's work, and ludditism's usually an excuse for normalizing viewing through eugenicist lenses those who cannot speak, cannot make contact, do not have all of those taken for granted physical and mental capabilities that make the online an option rather than a reality. What, then, is the issue? A Fine Balance has its skyrocket rating both in average and quantity, but if a single representative accurately spoke for the entirety of a demographic a token minority would be social justice rather than a scapegoat.

It took me five years to move from the landscape of the chosen few to that of the lowly read and lower rated, a similar focus on a similar region with similar issues, but, for whatever reasons, getting a microscopic share of the feeling that, yes, one should take the effort to educate oneself to the point that a work on postcolonial India does not pass one by as an attempt that was mostly failure. Somewhere in the many out theres are halls filled with those speaking Meena Alexander's name, but humans are social creatures, and I for one feel this work and its author deserve better than the platform Goodreads has so far afforded them. There's the Entertainment crowds, but there's also those who take for granted how often their opinions are considered knowledge despite being refuted over and over and over again, and between the two there's little consideration for a beauty that vivisects Wordsworth in order to treat with brutalities and does not trim itself into the objectivities of that poet's day, dry and stale and sill clinging on in the form of lists and prizes and indoctrinated credibility. Entertainment at least seeks novelty, whereas the power which likes to call itself knowledge would rather die in its sleep than give up its epistemological fallacy.

There's a particular set of people who appreciate the effort it takes to immerse oneself in prose beyond the norm, settings beyond the norm, conflicts of ouroboros beyond the norm, a norm at least in the halls of popularized classics, for if you look at the populations the statistical 'norm' is not bound in any way by the constraints of Europe and the United States. There's also people who read 500 GBBW as more than an uncommon acronym, so that may work where other aspects do not. The thing with the latter is, with regards to systematically devaluated average ratings and even lower readings, there's plenty more where that came from.

She was quite intent, holding them apart, then moving the fingers in a gesture so quick it seemed as if a dancer had made them, the half-finished mudra cut by an instant of hesitation, the sign of the lotus or the bee in flight trapped in incompletion as the audience hung on her grace, waiting.

[Prof. Mohamed Shareef]

Rameeza Be was a little woman who lived in a mountain village near Hyderabad. She came to the city with her husband. They went to see the celebrated ‘Isak Katha’ at Sagar Talkies. When the film finished, it was late at night. They started walking back to the house of some relative in the town. Suddenly a group of drunken policemen attacked them. Rameeza was raped by all the policemen. Her husband was violently attacked and his brain was beaten out. Later his dead body was recovered from a well behind the police station which was identified by his brother who was a lorry driver in Hyderabad. Rameeza became extremely ill because of the gang rape. There was a rumour in Hyderabad that Rameeza Be was hidden inside the police station so as to hush up the whole story of murder and rape. One day Ramu walked into the Gowliguda police station and enquired about Rameeza. The policemen became nervous and angry and shouted Ramu out of the police station.

Very soon the people got agitated and organized in small groups. They marched into the Gowliguda police station and attacked it. It was a gracious building built in the British style with stone steps, wooden pillars and whitewashed walls. They found Rameeza imprisoned in one of the cells. She was lying on the floor and Mira touched her forehead through the iron bars. The cell was broken in and Rameeza was taken to the house of Maitreyiamma. The agitators have brought numerous bottles filled with kerosene. Somebody lit a matchstick and suddenly the old wooden building of the police station began to burn. Within a few minutes hundreds of reserve police and gangs of Ever Ready men arrived on the scene. But they could do nothing as the building was completely destroyed. The rioters have already dispersed. A small number of rioters remained throwing stones and bricks at the policemen and they were immediately arrested and taken away.

Very soon the riot spread all over the city. The government tried to control the issue with all their might. The students were an active part of the revolutionary movement and so the classes couldn’t be conducted at the Sona Nivas College. The law and order situation was so bad that the normal evening shows of the Sagar Talkies was cancelled. Curfew was imposed for several days and it was removed only after the situation came under control. Once the city returned to normalcy, the birthday celebrations of the chief minister started. Limca Gowda arrived for the celebrations with a procession of horsemen and elephants. Trumpets and horns were played when he entered the venue of the pageant. Limca Gowda’s birth, childhood and youth were depicted on the stage in a highly dramatic style by inducing myth after myth into the episodes. The last stage was meant to be the appearance of film stars for singing songs in praise of the chief minister. A huge cardboard model of the ancient inner city of Hyderabad was displayed on the stage. Limca’s birthplace was specially highlighted in red light.

Suddenly a cracking sound was heard from the top of the cardboard city. A sheet of flame appeared and soon fire began to lick the entire stage. There was immediate confusion and people began run for their lives. There was a big sound of something exploding inside the cardboard city and thousands of wires, bulbs and cardboard pieces began to scatter all around the place. The wind rose high and firemen couldn’t control the flames. All around the pageant venue, people began to run in wild haste. There were men, women, society matrons, soldiers, sailors, peasants, street children, princes of state and poor sweepers of latrines. Within a few minutes the birthday celebrations organized with the effort of several months collapsed. Mira ran fast and escaped to the lotus pool behind the Public Gardens. To her great surprise, the water in the pool was found burning. A fire had been lit in the water. Mira remembered the ancient saying of Nagarjuna that if a fire is lit in water no one can

[Maria do Socorro Baptista · Rating 4 out of 5]

É uma narrativa que nos mostra a violência de Estado e abuso de poder na India recém independente, apontando também o papel das mulheres em uma sociedade patriarcal e opressora. Vê-se claramente
a herança do colonialismo e seu impacto na identidade individual e coletiva, assim como a luta por justiça em um contexto de repressão política, a consciência social e o despertar político de uma intelectual privilegiada. Muito bom.