Towering, Spokesperson Women Characters in the works of Meena Alexander and Chitra Banerjee: A Study

Abstract

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
path of her life that she appears to struggle with lines, boundaries and environments in her work and self.
This universal 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 transmutation of
the quiet Nampally Road into a noisy, crowded street. With a huge amount of state money being redirected
towards these extravagant 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. (Alexander: 1991: 30)