The Hero's Walk Novel Analysis

Journey from a Timid Provincialism to Global Consciousness:

Heroism in Anita Rao Badami’s The Hero 's Walk

Dr. Shalini Yadav*¹, Dr. Mukesh Yadav²

¹Assistant Professor, AlJouf University, Sakaka, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, PO.BOX 2014 ²Assistant Professor, AlJouf University, Sakaka, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, PO.BOX 2014

Abstract

Anita Rao Badami 's The Hero 's Walk is a story of a middle aged man Sripathi Rao, with a pedestrian job and a disintegrating family, who encounters the most unusual events in his life and presents heroism in life itself. The gradual expansion of Sripathi 's consciousness, process initiated after his daughter Maya 's death, and his inner conflict, with otherness, is well traced in the narrative by the novelist. The novel deals with the postcolonial themes of displacement and belonging, and tensions between old world traditions and new world mobility. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the strategies of survival to face and surmount the obstacles and Sripathi’s journey from a

Watching the holes laboriously dig for their eggs, Sripathi is “humbled by the sight of something that had started long before humans had been imagined into creations by Brahma, and had survived the voracious appetites of those same humans. In the long continuum of turtle life, humans were merely dots” (355). The image of the turtles, which occurs near the end of the book, precipitates the final crumbling of a worldview in which ethnocentrism is entangled with, and bolstered by, anthropocentrism. Sripathi’s intuition of the truth of the Darwinian precept that the origins and fates of humans and other living forms are “all melted together” culminates not just in a revised worldview, but also in renewed sense of responsibility for the