Symbolism In The Hero's Walk

The Hero’s Walk, which takes place in the fictional India town of Toturpuram, describes two journeys: the metaphorical journey of a middle aged Indian man, Sripathi Rao, from a timid provincialism to a more global consciousness, and the literal journey of his seven year old granddaughter, Nandana, who comes from Canada to India to live with her grandparents after the death of her parents in a car accident. For both Sripathi and Nandana, the Journey involves a kind of culture shock, followed by a gradual opening out towards otherness. Sripathi‟s self enclosure is symbolized in his residence, Big House on Brahmin Street whose “dean strong walls” stand as a monument to a world in which caste and colonial structures guaranteed that everyone and

J. Eng. Lit. Cult. becomes merely “Street” as (does) Lingayat Street, Mudliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram” (5) in a gesture of egalitarianism whose effects are literally, as well as symbolically, disorientating. The sense of displacement is compounded by changes that have occurred on the street itself over the last few decades- “instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine.... in scented sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns the street had become thud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, (and) the strident strains of the latest film music from video parlours” (5-6). The incursion of these loud and nestling registers of cultural change into the sanctuary of Sripathi‟s study mirrors more significant assaults on his sense of traditions including most worryingly, the refusal of his children to lead the lives he has imagined for him: his daughter Maya has broken off her engagement to an Indian man to marry a Canadian with whom she now lives in Vancouver, and his son Arun has rejected a tradition job in favour of a career as an environmental activist. Sripathi responds to the affronts by ceasing to communicate, literally, in the case of Maya, with whom he has stopped corresponding, and figuratively, with Arun and the rest of his family, through a retreat into an increasingly self enclosed world. The narrative traces the gradual expansion of his consciousness, a process initiated by Maya‟s death in a car