Postcolonial National Space in Meena Alexander's Nampally Road

ABSTRACT This paper offers a reading of Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road (NR) (1991) in the light of Homi K. Bhabha’s theorisation of the relation between nation and narration. For Bhabha, the nation is narrated through narratives which are unstable and inconsistent. These narratives, based on the past or established regularly in the present, are relentlessly refashioned. Negotiating the questions of personal and national identity, Meena Alexander’s novel delineates a post-independence Indian society, dominated by an ‘imagined’ political narrative. Throughout the novel, the protagonist’s observations of the nation and its cultural bases lead her to a redefinition of her national self. Furthermore, the novel exorcises Indian history from the shadows of colonial narratives and reconstructs an alternative postcolonial account. The marginalised female voices, resisting victimisation through their search for self-reconciliation in the interstices of memory and culture, empower a new discourse of the nation in the hybrid realm of culture. NR, it is argued, offers an image of national consciousness as achieved by undermining the hegemony of the past and the tyranny of the present. It tries to give voice to the subaltern by imaginatively and socially engaging them in the national, political, cultural and social narratives of their nation.