Nampally Road Meena Alexander (1991)
Set in Hyderabad, India, Nampally Road is MEENA
ALEXANDER’s first novel. It is narrated by Mira
Kannadical, an English professor who returns to
India after studying in England for four years and
getting a Ph.D. on Wordsworth from Nottingham
University. She felt distraught and out of place in
England and decided to start anew in India. How-
ever, the India that Mira returns to is full of unrest
and social disorder. She notices the poverty, mis-
ery, and pains that go with day-to-day life in India.
She questions her values and realizes that what she
is teaching and writing is not of much relevance to
the people at large. She tries to get more involved
with the society while attempting to understand
the environment around her. Living on Nampally
Road in the house of her landlady Durgabai (Little
Mother), she observes Little Mother attending to
the downtrodden people of the society. She also
comes in contact with Ramu, a leftist intellectual
whom she takes as a lover. Her relationship with
Ramu makes her politically informed and socially
mindful. Shaken by the gang rape of Rameeza Be
by police, and the murder of Be’s husband, Mira
goes to see Rameeza Be and feels bewildered and
lost. She questions her own life and the history of
the nation. She endeavors to understand her past
and formulate her future. She takes part in demon-
strations against the chief minister, Limca Gowda,
and becomes politically active. In the end, when
she learns that Rameeza Be has been brought to
Little Mother’s house to be nursed, she finds some
reconciliation.
Alexander, in Nampally Road, centers on vari-
ous issues including feminism, cultural retention,
politics, and history among others. One of the
themes of the novels is obviously the portrayal of
women’s issues in India. By presenting women as
mothers, political activists, and victims of a pa-
triarchal society, she is bringing to attention the
plight of women in a postcolonial nation. In the
so-called decolonized nations, women’s lives are
still colonized by the patriarchs in their homes and
in society at large. She describes Mira’s attempts to
escape an arranged marriage and her shunning of
traditional values. Alexander describes the roads,
crowds, shoppers, and the everyday activities on
the road with minute details and observations. As
Luis H. Francia puts it: “With its restless crowds,
cinemas, shops, temples, mango sellers, cobblers,
cafes, and bars, Nampally Road becomes a meta-
phor for contemporary India. Alexander has given
us an unsentimental, multifaceted portrait, thank-
fully remote from that of the British raj.” Written
in a lyrical narrative style, Nampally Road has been
received well in the literary world and was named
the editor’s choice in the Village Voice in 1991.Bibliography
Alexander, Meena. Nampally Road. San Francisco:
Mercury House, 1991.
Francia, Luis H. Review of Nampally Road. Village
Voice (March 26, 1991): 74.
Perry, John Oliver. Review of Meena Alexander’s
Nampally Road. World Literature Today 65, no. 2
(1991): 364.
Asma SayedNarayan, Kirin (1959– )
Novelist and anthropologist Kirin Narayan was
born Kirin Contractor in Bombay. Her father, Na-
rayan Ramji Contractor, studied civil engineering
at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He met
German-American Didi Kinzinger and married
her in 1950. Their fourth child, Kirin considers
both of her grandmothers to be early role models
who taught her to read and instilled in her a flair
for storytelling. Writers such as Grace Paley, J. D.
Salinger, and R. K. Narayan, meanwhile, became
models for her own fiction.
After primary education in India, Kirin Na-
rayan continued her studies in the United States,
receiving a doctorate in anthropology from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1987. She
teaches anthropology and South Asian studies
at the University of Wisconsin. Her first book-
length project, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels:
Folk Narratives in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989)
emerged from extensive interviews with “Swamiji,”
a religious teacher from her father’s hometown.
Narayan argues that “folk narrative is a dominant
medium for the expression of Hindu insights”; herNarayan, Kirin 209