THE “HOMECOMING” OF NANDANA IN THE HERO’S WALK: THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Abstract

In 2001 Anita Rau Badami, a writer of Indian descent living in Canada, wrote her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, where she portrays the life of Sripathi Rao, a middle-aged family man working as an advertising copywriter in a small city on the Bay of Bengal. Female characters surround Sripathi; on the one hand are her domineering octogenarian mother, his 44-year-old unmarried sister and a subservient wife; on the other hand, his daughter Maya is living with her husband in Vancouver. As fate unfolds, his daughter and her husband are killed in an accident, and Sripathi decides to bring back his seven-year-old granddaughter, Nandana, to India. Shocked by the death of her parents, Nandana remains, in the novel, a mute spectator of the contradictions and woes of Indian society, such as the “stench of fish, human beings, diesel oil, food frying, poor drains, chaotic traffic and pervasive corruption”. In this paper, we are interested in studying the youngest of the female characters, Nandana, a girl carrying two cultures, Indian and Canadian and according to Nirmala, the wife of Sripathi, is “HALF-FOREIGN”. She is aware of Hindu Gods through the stories narrated by her mother, Maya. She also leant a little Kannada from her. However, in India, the Hindu culture and Indianness confuse her. Confused in her “new” family, Nandana prefers to call herself a “Canadian”. In the end, these questions need to be answered, where does Nandana “belong”? This paper attempts to delve into this question through Badami’s Nandana.