Self-Fashioning of Colonial and Renunciatory Masculinity: The Making of the ‘Underdeveloped’ Ego in “One Out of Many”

Abstract

This paper examines the colonial and postcolonial construction of the underdeveloped Hindu male ego in V.S. Naipaul’s “One Out of Many”, focusing on immigrant Santosh—who migrates from Bombay to Washington—as a site where gender, caste, and race intersect. Using Stephen Greenblatt’s technique of New Historicism as a methodological tool, it argues that Santosh’s posture, psychological and sexual crises epitomize colonial and psychoanalytical discourses that feminized Hindu masculinity through martial race ideology and psychoanalytic tropes. The paper shows how Naipaul employs, in the novella, colonial period’s circulating Hindu symbolic motifs such as Kali, Prayashchittam (purificatory rituals), bronze gods, and brass plates to reinforce images of Hindu men as guilt-ridden, impure, sexually deficient and lacking assertiveness, and gift of vison. The paper further argues by excavating an archived letter of Sudhir Kakar how Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization appropriated Sudhir Kakar’s psychoanalytic approaches to undermine Hindu masculinity. It concludes that Santosh is less a universal immigrant and more a culturally historicized projection of colonial, and psychoanalytical discourses on emasculation.

1. Introduction

Much of the existing scholarship on colonial Indian masculinity in the literature has been shaped by Orientalist frameworks. To explain hegemonic masculinity pitted against marginalized forms, scholars have largely followed three trajectories: first, evaluating Indian masculinity against changing Victorian ideals of manhood—discipline, self-mastery, heroism, and military adventurism—as represented in popular and gothic literature by Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, and Conan Doyle (Connell 2005; Dasgupta and Gokulsing 2013; Deane 2014; Berger 2020; Griffiths 2021); second, critiquing patriarchy within feminist analyses of Indian society; and third, identifying masculinity with entrenched chauvinism in traditional structures.

Within this contested field, V.S. Naipaul’s (1932–2018) male characters are typically interpreted either as products of hybridity or as figures of displacement. A critical but underexplored dimension of his work is his depiction of Indian masculinity—a construct destabilized by colonial ideologies. Scholars such as Gopinath (2005), Ceraso and Connolly (2009), and Ali (2023, 2020) have examined this in A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mimic Men. From a New Historicist perspective, this paper shifts the focus to Santosh in “One Out of Many” to argue that Santosh’s subjectivity is produced at the intersection of colonial discourse, cultural memory, and competing models of masculinity. These competing models reveal the ideological sources of his ‘enclosed culture’.

Existing scholarship on colonial Indian masculinity has overwhelmingly located the source of male subjection in British imperial discourse: the ‘martial races’ ideology, Victorian domesticity, and the effeminization of the Hindu male. The enduring echo of this colonial tactic persists even today in the works of a specific class of Asian immigrant, Western-educated writers whom Anthony Appiah, in the African context, terms the “comprador intelligentsia” (Appiah 1992, p. 149). These writers—including notably Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi—mediate cultural commodification, profiting from what Graham Huggan calls the “otherness industry”: the exoticization of marginalized identities (Huggan 2001, p. xiii).1 Their discourses are sustained by Eurocentric epistemologies that suppress native histories, positioning European history as “a silent referent” and “an entelechy of universal reason” (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 28–29). This dynamic is further complicated by ‘cosmopolitanism’—a network of European eclecticism, languages, and histories—which compels postcolonial nationalisms to define themselves within its framework.

Naipaul is an ambivalent member of this intelligentsia. Unlike Rushdie’s explicit play with hybridity, Naipaul’s portrayals of Hindu ideological and social apparatuses often echo Eurocentric notions of rationality, empowered by “the European gift of observations and judgment,” overshadowing native history in a “dateless darkness and barbarity” (Zhou 2015, p. 153).

This paper does not dispute the genealogy of colonial tropes concerning the effeminization of the Hindu male. However, in this paper, it is argued that this account is incomplete. What has been critically undertheorized is the role of post-independence psychoanalytic scholarship—both Indian and European, including Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950), Sudhir Kakar’s The Inner World (1978), and the literati such as U. R. Anantha Murthy—and post-structuralist scholarship in consolidating and perpetuating the cultural imagination in the very figure of the fractured, ‘enclosed’ male subject. These approaches sought to explore tensions between phallicism and mysticism, Brahmacharya and desire, and karma and guilt in Indian male identity.2

This paper demonstrates that Santosh’s masculinity is not solely a colonial artifact. Rather, it is co-produced by two forces: first, British imperial discourse on Hindu effeminacy; and second, post-independence Indian psychoanalytic scholarship, which, in its well-intentioned scrutiny of institutions like Brahmacharya, furnished Naipaul with a pathological model of the Hindu male as irredeemably torn between mysticism and phallicism. The gap this paper addresses, therefore, is not merely literary but genealogical: scholars have traced the “enclosed” Indian male to colonialism alone. I trace him also to the postcolonial Indian academy.

2. New Historicism: A Literary Framework

This study undertakes a New Historicist reading of V. S. Naipaul’s “One Out of Many” demonstrating how literary and non-literary texts participate in the circulation of power within their historical moments. It draws on key concepts developed by Stephen Greenblatt, particularly in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). For Greenblatt, the human subject is “the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society,” and therefore literary texts must be understood as cultural artifacts rather than autonomous aesthetic objects. Within such texts, there are “no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity” (Greenblatt 1980, p. 256). Greenblatt’s concept of the ‘circulation of social energy,’ offers a crucial analytical framework. He argues that texts are “products of extended borrowings, collective exchanges, and mutual enchantments,” shaped through the movement of cultural elements—language, metaphors, rituals, clothing, and narratives—across socially demarcated boundaries (Greenblatt 1988, p. 7).

Using these conceptual tools, this paper examines how Naipaul’s text “One Out of Many” negotiates the intersecting discourses of both colonial and some psychoanalytical writers in post-independent India. It focuses on the ways in which cultural artifacts—such as notions of purity and pollution, the performance of Hare Krishna rituals, and symbolic markers like the dhoti—function within broader structures of power, discipline, and representation.

The book In a Free State (1971)—the winner of The Booker Prize 1971—contains “connected pieces on a theme of displacement” (French 2008, p. 386). The novel as a whole is populated by–to use phrases by Bruce King—‘expatriates’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘alien minorities’ without a home, or necessary skills and resources to survive in the capitals of the world (King 1993, p. 83). Including three short stories, it is bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. This paper, breaking away from the traditional frameworks,3 focuses on the first story “One Out of Many” to explore the theme of framing of Indian masculinity in Santosh, a domestic servant from Bombay. His migration to Washington, D.C., in search of a better life, exposes him to experiences of racial alienation, emasculation, duality, and existential displacement. Through Santosh’s internal conflict and social marginality, Naipaul lays bare the deep scars that colonial histories have etched into the psychic lives of postcolonial Indian men. He is unable to reconcile his Indian identity with the racialized hierarchies and expectations of the American social order. He feels condemned in the “Sartrean sense” (Singh 2002, p. 139). Santosh’s representation, his classical Hindu identity, his encounter with figures such as Kali, the hubshi, and the symbols like ‘bronze gods’ illustrate how colonial narratives of the underdeveloped, fractured, racialized, effeminate, and dependent Hindu male ego persist. By examining Santosh through the frameworks of colonial masculinity, caste anxieties, and psychoanalytic theory—especially Sudhir Kakar’s ideas on Indian ego-formation (the way Naipaul explained it)—this paper explores how “One Out of Many” participates in the colonial psychoanalytic discourses of emasculation.

While critics like Sara Suleri, throughout the book—and especially in the chapter “Naipaul’s Arrival” (Suleri 1992, pp. 77, 149–73), and Smith (2025), critique Naipaul’s ambivalence toward postcolonial resistance, others, such as Dhondy (2024), defend his unflinching portrayal of colonial trauma. Regarding In a Free State and A Bend in the River, he (2008) argued that “The novels are uncluttered with any attempt to apologize for or to historicize the ugliness with theories of colonialism. Greed, delusion, and cruelty are not the characteristics of any one race.” (Dhondy 2008, p. 193). In his relatively recent work Dhondy—otherwise possessed of imaginative gifts and progressive principles—opined that “Naipaul told the stories of Indians suffering from double-think, holding contrary universes in their heads simultaneously” (Dhondy 2024, p. 171).4 In some critics’ view Santosh is a stereotypical immigrant. Rahim seeks to explore the theme of the possibility of freedom in the novella. In the United States, unlike his life in India, Santosh “is tormented by the possibilities he cannot take advantage of.” (Rahim 2022). Misra (2024) argues that “Santosh’s story has meaning by itself” (Misra 2024, p. 85).

To frame such a character, Naipaul could not choose someone living in a multicultural Trinidadian society. Nor could he set the story in India, where—as he argued in one of the interviews—there is no coherent sense of “a racial grouping” (Wheeler 1997, p. 41). Instead, Naipaul isolates Santosh—a Hindu—from his community in Bombay. This separation allows him to parody the classical Hindu way of life and highlight what he sees as a “defective vision” in the character. A comparative lens is also employed through U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (2012),5 where similar themes of sexual guilt, caste identity, and ego fragmentation emerge.

First, I trace colonial and psychoanalytical (in limited Indian context) discourses of Hindu effeminacy, then analyze Santosh’s sexual and caste crises through comparative lenses.

3. Martial Race Myth and Hindu Effeminacy in Colonial Discourses

From the early nineteenth century until the end of British rule in 1947, the question of Indian masculinity was persistently framed within the ideological apparatus of empire. Central to this framework was the colonial construction of the “martial races,” a classificatory system that distinguished between communities deemed naturally warlike and those considered inherently weak, passive, or effeminate. This taxonomy was not merely administrative; it functioned as a cultural and epistemic tool that legitimized imperial authority by encoding racial hierarchy into the very definition of masculinity.

British imperial discourse—circulated through travelogues, administrative records, memoirs, and literary texts—repeatedly foregrounded the superiority of European manhood. As Ann Laura Stoler has shown, such representations were deeply entangled with Victorian anxieties about racial purity and miscegenation (Stoler 2002, pp. 32–33, 71). The fear of “degeneration” or “mongrelization,” as noted by Krishnaswamy (1998), was not simply biological but civilizational: it threatened the moral and cultural foundations of empire. In response, colonial ideology elevated “character”—coded as discipline, virility, and self-control—as the defining attribute of the ruling race. The empire was thus imagined as a paternalistic enterprise sustained by masculine authority (The Economy of Colonial Desire, p. 17).

Within this schema, Indian subjects were differentially gendered. Macaulay’s binaries of “fair race” vs. “dark Hindoo” crystallized the racialized gender ideology (Macaulay 1922, p. 26). Through sterile terminologies and crude metaphors, British colonial discourse consistently undermined the physical stature of a Hindu: lacking in physical stature, prowess, manliness, the trustworthiness of character, and proper sexual orientation. Hindus’ physicality—“bow-legged,” “shrinking,” “womanly”—was mocked in the literature and reports. Even within India, manliness qualities were contrasted across communities. James Mill in The History of British India admired the manners and manliness of Mahomedan conquerors of India. In contrast, he considered Hindus as “passive people” (Mill 1817, p. 631).6 Thomas Macaulay contrasted “manly” Muslims or Europeans with “timid, parsimonious, and deceitful” Hindus, especially Bengalis (Macaulay 1889, p. 63). In such narratives, descriptions of physical posturing, and movements were positioned in opposition to the martial race ideal. Megha (2020) concludes that: “The natural tendency was to scoff at the intellectual effeminate male who was not manly enough to command empires, and hence, the need to recreate themselves along European lines” (p. 16).

The figure of the “effeminate babu” emerged as a particularly potent trope within this discursive field. It laid the groundwork for the feminization of Indian national character and the ideological justification of the empire. In later part of 19th century, the trope of the Bengali Babu—otherwise “effeminate babu”—emerged from colonial disdain for the Bengali middle class employed in clerical roles. Macaulay describes “Bengalee” as “effeminately timid in personal conflict” (Warren Hastings, p. 43). To George Warrington Steevens, a Bengali’s face shows “quick intelligence”, and “his eye is shifty”. The Bengali’s leg is either skin or bone, the same size all the way down with round thighs like a woman (Steevens 1899, p. 73) (See also (Sinha 1995), and (McClintock 1995)). Wurgaft (1983) noted that “The contrast between British strength and Bengali weakness, both physical and moral, became one of the most predictable themes in Anglo-Indian literature and political discourse.” (p. 27). Certain charges of ‘weaknesses’ among the native characters (from Kipling’s perspective) included “indifference to order and cleanliness, sexual depravity, and passivity—defects attributed to extricable racial differences.” (p. 45). Deceitfulness and cowardice were regarded supposedly the inherent to the Bengali.

At the same time, this figure cannot be reduced to a simple object of ridicule. This type of Bengali babu was considered a participant victim of colonization by paying homage to the victor. He belonged to that type of Indian Ashish Nandy calls “bicultural Indian babu” (Nandy 1983, p. 67), who:

… processes the West on behalf of his society and reduces it to a digestible bolus. Both his comical and dangerous selves protect his society against the White Sahib… he turns out to be… not the conspiratorial dedicated oppressor… but a self-destructive co-victim with a reified lifestyle and a parochial culture.

(p. 15)

The ‘babu’ was thus both a product of colonial discourse and an agent within it—a “participant-victim” whose identity exposed the contradictions of imperial power. Even though ‘babu’ became synonymous with ‘Bengali’ it was not geographically confined to erstwhile Bengal alone. It represented a special class of effeminate Hindu across India, glued to British imperialism, its culture and sophistication of English language, but lacked in the masculinity.

Far more central to the colonial stereotyping of Hindu male bodies was the persistent mockery of indigenous dress. A striking instance appears in the Illustrated Weekly of India (1970), where Nergis Dalal, under the sub-heading “These Disgusting Dhotis,” recounts a Brown Memsaheb’s (BM) observation at an airport lounge:

In an airport lounge one afternoon, a dhoti-clad VIP appeared. There was a high wind and, in spite of the V I P. holding the end of his dhoti up with one hand, it was blown all over the place, exposing a fair amount of rather hairy leg. An unmistakably BM voice was heard to exclaim—“I always knew it was an indecent sort of dress, but I didn’t realise they wore nothing under it”.

(Dalal 1970, pp. 11–12)

Such anecdotes, however crude, reveal how the dhoti became a metonym for Hindu impropriety and inadequate manhood, reinforcing the effeminacy trope through everyday material culture.

Naipaul was not ignorant of the iconography of the Bengali babu or their variants. In his essay Jamshed into Jimmy (1963), he discussed the reputation of a Bengali as “insufferably arrogant”, and “lazy” (Naipaul 2003, p. 9). While describing Mullick Palace in Bengal, Naipaul remarked on the Bengali babu’s eagerness to prove his appreciation of European culture: “None of the dusty treasures of the Mallick Palace is Indian, save perhaps for a portrait of the collector: the original Bengali babu, anxious to prove to the supercilious European his appreciation of European culture (2003, p. 10).

These constructions of effeminacy extended beyond the social and political domains into the realm of sexuality. Colonial discourse did not merely feminize the Indian male; it also displaced him from the sphere of sexual agency. As Anjali Arondekar argues, the colonial archive frequently renders Indian men as peripheral figures—servants, intermediaries, or facilitators—within narratives of sexual encounter, rather than as active, desiring subjects (Arondekar 2009, pp. 117–18). Masculinity, in this configuration, is not only weakened but rendered spectatorial.

In contrast, Indian women were subject to a different, though equally reductive, mode of representation. Colonial engagements with classical erotic texts contributed to this reconfiguration of sexual knowledge. Translations of works such as Kama Sutra (1883) and Ananga Ranga (1885) in the late nineteenth century introduced European audiences to highly systematized accounts of desire, pleasure, and bodily typologies.7 However, the translation of Vatsayayana’s Kama Sutra became “emblematic of the fantastical Orientalism that shaped the late nineteenth century imagination about India.” (Mitra 2020, p. 27). While these texts originally functioned within specific philosophical and social frameworks, their colonial reception often emphasized their exotic and erotic dimensions. As a result, Indian sexuality was both codified and sensationalized, producing a taxonomy of female desire that foregrounded variation, excess, and accessibility while the male sexuality eclipsing under the weight of masculine imperialism.

Hugh Urban beautifully compares in adjectival form the views about Indian males and females from colonial and national perspective (Urban 2003, p. 194):

	MALE	FEMALE
Imperial imagination	effeminate	/
	weak, degenerate	/
	licentious	/
	/	Overly sexual, seductive, and draining
National imagination	strong, virile	/
	militant	/
	hypermasculine	/
	ksatriyahood	violent, strong, militant

This asymmetrical representation in colonial imagination contributed to a broader reordering of gender relations within colonial discourse. Indian femininity was alternately aestheticized, eroticized, and moralized, while Indian masculinity was marked by absence, lack, or inadequacy. The cumulative effect was not simply the feminization of the male subject, but his displacement from the very domain through which masculinity was conventionally asserted.

The persistence of these tropes can be observed in the works of V. S. Naipaul. In his essays, early comedies, novels, and travel narratives, figures—except Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men—such as clerks, native informants, trickster/s (e.g., Ganesh, Mr. Surujpat Harbans), guides, drivers, and passersby populate the landscape, yet they are rarely endowed with a sense of sexual or existential agency. Instead, they appear as observers, functionaries, or bodies embedded in routines of labour and survival.

4. Psychoanalysis of the Hindu Male: Sexuality, Asceticism, and Naipaul’s Reductive Reading of Kakar

While late nineteenth-century colonial discourse privileged the exploration of female sexuality, the post-1950 period witnessed a growing psychoanalytic engagement with the Hindu male, often framed through tensions between asceticism, repression, and erotic desire—with conflicts between Gandhi’s phallicism and mysticism serving as frequent referents. For instance, in Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (Erikson 1969), the theme of renunciatory masculinity within Hindu worldview surfaces. This shift, enabled by the rise of modern psychology, produced competing interpretations of Indian masculinity—either as fractured and repressed or as culturally distinct in its libidinal organization.

Within this intellectual milieu, Nirad C. Chaudhuri and Sudhir Kakar represent divergent approaches that Naipaul engaged with. V. S. Naipaul, while undermining the former, leans toward the latter, albeit in a reductive reading fashion. Chaudhuri foregrounds an openly erotic Hindu tradition in The Continent of Circe (1965),8 portraying male sexuality as persistent, even within ascetic renunciation. It is frequently mediated through female agency cast as ‘redeemer’ and; transformer’ of male sexuality: “men’s lust is the woman’s burden” (Chaudhuri 1965, p. 240). Hindu males actually “looked up to the woman to rescue their lust from its creeping paralysis”. In his view, ancient Hindu felt infatuation “for coitus in the reversed position, i.e., with the woman as the active parter, which they called purushayita or viparita rati” (pp. 241–42). By contrast, Kakar’s psychoanalytic framework—if viewed through universal framework—emphasizes the formation of the self within familial and cultural structures, highlighting dependency, repression, and the shaping of desire through early socialization.

V. S. Naipaul engages selectively with these traditions. While he critiques Chaudhuri’s overemphasis on “on the pleasures of purushayita” or reversed position.” (Naipaul 1976, p. 73), his reading of Kakar in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) in the section A Defect of Vison, reduces a complex psychoanalytic model to a civilizational diagnosis of the Indian ego as ‘underdeveloped’ which he deceptively attributes to Sudhir Kakar.9

Paraphrasing Kakar’s views about ‘underdeveloped’ ego in Indian setting, Naipaul explains: “The individual is never on his own; he is always fundamentally a member of his group, with a complex apparatus of rules, rituals, taboos (Naipaul 1979, p. 102); Indian subjects—both sexes—remain bound by ritual, collective identity, and an inability to achieve reflective self-consciousness, or the ‘Western ways of perceiving’. Summarizing Kakar, he writes “Kakar says that his Indian patients, men and women, do not have this gift, cannot describe the sex act, are capable only of saying, ‘It happened.’” (p. 103).10 This argument is an offshoot of misinformed, and reductive reading of Kakar which he extends to literary figures such as Praneshacharya in Anantha Murthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man.

For Naipaul, in Anantha Murthy’s Samskara, Acharya’s sexual experience with Chandari—the ‘untouchable’—fails to liberate him. For instance, while aligning with Kakar’s lines that Indian male and female are just capable of saying that sex “happens”, he quotes the lines—put within single inverted comma but truncated one—from Samskara: ‘It was a sacred moment—nothing before it, nothing after it… Formless before, formless after. (p. 107).11

However, this appropriation simplifies Kakar’s more nuanced account. In later works such as The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India and Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (1990), Kakar presents Indian sexuality not merely as repressed or infantile but as polymorphous, symbolically rich, and culturally mediated through myth, fantasy, and narrative traditions. His analysis of folklore and mythology complicates the binary of repression and expression, revealing a dynamic interplay between desire and social regulation.12

Naipaul’s reading, therefore, is not only selective but reductive: it abstracts Kakar’s clinical insights into a broader civilizational critique, reinforcing the very stereotypes it appears to diagnose. It is reinforced and, albeit, represented in a myopic way while referring to one vague (private) letter which becomes “aesthetic property”—to use a phrase by Greenblatt (Greenblatt 1989, p. 11). In this sense, Naipaul’s construction of Indian male sexuality attuned to group identity formation and affiliation owes not so much to Kakar as to the psycho-social models of Erik Erikson, particularly the notion of a weak or diffuse ego shaped by collective identity. Erikson’s “essay shows the influence of Freud’s assertions about how conscience can be lost in groups.” (Martin-Joy 2025, p. 97). Erikson’s interest was not immune from studying the Indian psychology. His work Childhood and Society (1950)—particularly chapter VIII titled Eight Stages of Man—reverberates with themes (e.g., initiative, guilt, shame) of underdeveloped ego that Naipaul espoused so vehemently through Kakar. Likewise, Kakar somehow adapted Erikson to a contemporary Indian setting. While analyzing his stages of life, Kakar believed that Erikson’s stages of life or “basic virtues” have “startling affinity to the Hindu asrama (stages of life) theory” (Kakar 1968, p. 127). Later on, Erikson himself engaged with the study of Indian male psychology. He, in his First Vikram Sarabhai Memorial Lecture (delivered 9 February 1977), in the seminar ‘Identity and Adulthood in India’ discussed the Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s filmed version of Anantha Murthy’s Samskara (Erikson 1979). In a later work, he sought to explore the theme of Brahmacharya in Gandhi: not being active sexually or of cutting off one’s masculinity, and instead taking care of each other (Erikson 1969, p. 400).

The perceptions of gendered masculinity of Indian (Hindu) male (effeminate, clever with hybrid identity) built over the years during 18th and 19th century by the colonial writers through various modes of representation, and views (about group identity formation, initiative, guilts, and shame) of psychoanalyst like Erikson, instead of Kakar, are central to his characterization of figures such as Santosh.

5. Racial Pollution, Sexual Transgression, and Ritual Purification in “One Out of Many”

In mapping the tale of the Indian domestic servant Santosh, Naipaul’s novella presents the trope of racial impurity. Santosh is, to use Baneth-Nouailhetas’s phrase, “pretailored to fit the pedagogical and ideological aims of the author” (Baneth-Nouailhetas 2002, p. 15). Those aims—the exploration of Aryan race purity and its degradation at the hands of the hubshi—emerge from a wider discursive field in which racial anxiety, caste pollution, and colonial sexual fantasy are already entangled in the social structure and experienced privately by Santosh himself.

While roaming the streets of Washington, Santosh experiences a moment of racial recognition. He briefly identifies with a group of dancers:

The men were bearded, barefooted and in saffron robes, and the girls were in saris and canvas shoes that looked like our own Bata shoes. They were shaking little cymbals and chanting and lifting their heads up and down and going round in a circle, making a lot of dust. It was little bit like a Red Indian dance in a cowboy movie, but they were chanting Sanskrit words in praise of Lord Krishna.

(Naipaul 1971, p. 34)

But the recognition curdles. Their half-caste appearances disturb him. He imagines they “had been brought here among the hubshi as captives a long time ago and had become a lost people like our own wandering gipsy folk, and had forgotten who they were.” (p. 34). Observing in them the loss of racial purity, he feels distaste. They become to him degraded and deformed, like lepers. The dancer scene performs a key operation of racial ideology: the search for one’s own kind, followed by the horror of finding them already contaminated. The sex scene with the black woman intensifies this logic.13 Santosh falls ‘helplessly’:

The hubshi woman came in, moving among my employer’s ornaments like a bull. I was greatly provoked. The smell was too much; so was the sight of her armpits. I fell. She dragged me down on the couch… I saw the moment, helplessly, as one of dishonour. I saw her as Kali, goddess of death and destruction, coal-black, with a red tongue and white eyeballs and many powerful arms. I expected her to be wild and fierce; but she added insult to injury by being very playful… I would have liked to withdraw, but the act took over and completed itself. And then I felt dreadful. I wanted to be forgiven, I wanted to be cleansed, I wanted her to go.

(p. 42)

The woman herself does nothing demonic. Her playfulness is the opposite of the fierce destruction Santosh expects. Yet his perception overrides her behaviour. His Kali is drawn from a recognizable colonial archive: blood-thirsty, immodest in her nudity, and aggressive in her sexuality (Kinsley 1975, pp. 138, 155). British ethnographers registered a fascinated horror at what Benita Parry called the “meretricious interlocking of sex and worship” in Hindu rites (Parry 1998, p. 79). John Campbell Oman documented “licentious songs and lewd dances” among the worshippers of Kali and Durga (Oman 1907, p. 24). Naipaul’s text does not simply reproduce these colonial accounts. Rather, it circulates within the same discursive economy: a dark female divine whose power is simultaneously sexual, racial, and destructive. The hubshi woman becomes coal-black Kali not because Naipaul believes this equivalence, but because the available language for black female sexuality in the metropolitan imagination offers no other vocabulary.

The horror Santosh feels is not merely racial; it is religious and civilizational. He “preserves the Aryan racial dread of the dark-skinned, even among the blacks of Washington” (Hughes 1988, p. 82). His internalized code—“It is written in our books, both holy and not so holy, that it is indecent and wrong for a man of our blood to embrace the hubshi woman. To be dishonoured in this life, to be born a cat or a monkey or a hubshi in the next!” (Naipaul 1971, p. 38)—transforms sexual union into karmic catastrophe. The act “took over and completed itself” just as it does for the Brahmin Praneshacharya in Anathamurthy’s novel. But the difference lies in the discursive surrounding: Santosh’s crisis is legible only within a specific historical convergence of caste purity, transmigration theology, and colonial racial science.

What follows is a ritual of purification that reads as theatre. Santosh bathes repeatedly. The smell will not leave. He rubs himself with half a lemon: “Penance and cleansing; but it didn’t hurt as much as I expected, and I extended the penance by rolling about naked on the floor of the bathroom and the sitting room and howling. At last, the tears came, real tears, and I was comforted” (p. 42). In an air-conditioned Washington apartment, he drapes himself in a new cotton dhoti brought from Bombay, lights incense sticks, sits cross-legged, and tries to meditate. This is his prayashchittam—his penance. Peter Hughes calls it “a comically horrible sense of self-pollution that is at once racial and sexual” (1988, p. 82).14 But the comedy is the index of displacement. A caste-cleansing ritual performed in a sealed apartment while the city outside burns is not simply personal guilt. It is a performance of identity that has lost its social ground but not its psychic hold.

That burning city is not incidental. Observing through a window with his employer, Santosh sees “the smoke of the real fire” as the hubshi burn Washington. In his mood of prayer and repentance, the news is “welcome.” For four days, he watches. If “Happiness was on the faces of the hubshi” (Naipaul 1971, p. 44), then he too is happy. He shares “their exhilaration”. When an interviewer (1971) later asked Naipaul about this imagery—the burning fires without descriptive detail about Washington—he replied that this was “the immigrant’s view of the capital of the world, the view of a man from another, enclosed culture” (Hamilton 1997, p. 19). That “enclosed culture” is symptomatic. The destruction of the established society appears as a form of revenge for racial pollution—both for Santosh himself and for his imagined community. The text here performs a curious reversal: the victim of racial anxiety fantasizes the annihilation of those who have contaminated him yet finds himself aligned with their happiness.

Naipaul’s own biography enters the archive not as explanation but as another circulating discourse. In the Prologue to an Autobiography, he recapitulates his father Seepersad Naipaul’s “special horror of the Kali cult” in Chaguanas—a horror born of his father’s mother-in-law being a devotee of Kali (Naipaul 1985, p. 64).15 The younger Naipaul, however, does not simply reproduce his father’s Trinidadian Hindu perspective.16

Naipaul remains, intentionally or otherwise, part of the imperial project’s commodification of its own fictions and fantasies, enlarging the imaginative landscape of the metropolitan reader about the indigenous population. He maintains, in the final instance, the colonial discursive patterns of rhetoric and topoi rather than those of his father and Trinidadian society. This delineation is, as Benita Parry argues, one of the “metaphoric continuities in the vast library of empire” (Parry 2004, p. 112). The novella does not transcend this archive. It adds another volume to it—but a volume with marginal annotations that sometimes, not always, let the reader glimpse the machinery behind the text.

6. Santosh’s Fragmented Identity: Race, Caste, and Subalternity

Santosh’s characterization has often been confined within reductive interpretive frames. Critics have read him as a political victim (Gurr 1982; Humann 2010) or as an allegorical figure of identity loss. While such readings illuminate certain dimensions, they risk flattening the psychic complexity that structures his subjectivity. Santosh is neither an empowered migrant nor a self-aware narrator, nor even a conventionally tragic sufferer. Rather, he represents a more unsettling figure: a subject who has internalized subordination so thoroughly that he unwittingly collaborates with it while refashioning his identities.

From the outset, even though he is portrayed as a buffoon utterly lacking self-esteem, Santosh carries the weight of colonial history in his subconscious. Manjit Singh observed: “Freedom, its excitement, loss of selfhood, exile, abandonment; they are writ large into artificially devised freedom in the clownish Santosh” (Singh 2002, p. 139). From a psychoanalytic perspective, Santosh’s behaviour reveals a deeply fractured ego, shaped by repression, anxiety, and internalized inferiority. His body becomes the primary site where this psychic dislocation is staged. On the airplane to Washington, his inability to manage the simple act of chewing and spitting betel nut turns into a scene of grotesque humiliation: he swallows, falls ill, and eventually vomits. Later, confronting his reflection in the airplane mirror, he sees “the colours of a corpse” (Naipaul 1971, p. 29). These moments are not incidental; they dramatize what may be understood as the collapse of bodily sovereignty under the pressure of an alien symbolic order.

This abjection extends into Santosh’s gendered identity. He is repeatedly figured through tropes historically associated with colonial discourse on the “effeminized native male”: passive, fearful, and incapable of assertion. His encounter with the hubshi woman is particularly revealing. She is the Other or alien (normally unformed and chaotic)—from Greenblatt’s perspective—that he had to wrestle with (Greenblatt 1980, p. 9). Her attraction to his “smallness and strangeness” (Naipaul 1971, p. 38) reverses normative power relations, yet this inversion does not empower Santosh; instead, it intensifies his anxiety. Unable to assert control, he experiences the encounter as violation rather than intimacy. In his second chance meeting with hubshi woman at the public place, he, again, imagines her as Kali—“many-armed, goddess of death and destruction”. His fear assumes mythic proportions: “she moved towards me. I got up and ran… not looking back” (p. 56). Psychoanalytically, this projection signals castration anxiety and a deeper crisis of masculine identity, shaped not only by personal repression but also by inherited cultural prohibitions surrounding sexuality.

At the same time, Santosh’s subjectivity is inseparable from the historical discourses that produce it. A New Historicist reading reveals how his consciousness is saturated with colonial stereotypes circulating between literary and non-literary domains. The colonial construction of the Hindu male as weak, deceitful, and effeminate finds an uncanny echo in Santosh’s self-perception. His self-description as “dirt” (pp. 33, 40), coupled with his fleeting moment of self-recognition—when, encouraged by the hubshi girl’s attraction, he begins to see himself from being “unnoticeable” to “handsome” and possessed of “good looks”—demonstrates how imperial ideology is internalized as self-knowledge. Yet this fragile confidence quickly collapses. ‘Good looks’ brought “strains” upon him (p. 39). He becomes a victim of self-fashioning, which, as Stephen Greenblatt argues, is constituted in relation to an “alien, strange, or hostile” Other—an imagined threat that must be constructed to be confronted and ultimately negated (Greenblatt 1980, p. 9). Maintaining ‘appearances’ became an obsession with him: “It was like an illness. I would be watching television, for instance, and I would be surprised by the thought: are you as handsome as that man?” (Naipaul 1971, p. 39). Later, gripped by fear and anxiety, he reimagines his face as “pudgy, sallow, and full of spots… becoming ugly” (p. 51), revealing the instability of a ‘self’ formed under the pressure of conflicting discourses.

Santosh’s relationship to material culture further underscores this internalization of the ‘alien’—or threatening—Other. This dynamic is vividly staged in the café episode, where he is refused service and abruptly expelled. When he enters a café or tea stall in search of “the domestics,” the girl [behind the counter] drives him away, warning that they do not “serve hippies or barefoot people.” The rejection is immediate and humiliating, marking his body as socially illegible within the codes of the host culture. Santosh’s response registers both confusion and wounded awareness:

“O, father! I had come out without my shoes. But what a country, I thought, walking briskly away, where people are never allowed to dress normally but must forever wear their very best! Why must they wear out shoes and fine clothes for no purpose?…”

(pp. 34–35)

The consequence of this episode is not simple resentment but a deeper internalization of external norms. Adorning the body becomes a private obsession. His desire “to adorn my simple body”—through the green suit, hat, belt, and polished shoes—signals an attempt at self-fashioning within an alien cultural framework (p. 40). Yet this effort remains incomplete and ultimately futile: he rehearses wearing the green suit—that he had bought—in private but cannot step outside in it. In New Historicist terms, this is a failed act of self-fashioning, where the subject attempts to inhabit a dominant cultural script but lacks the symbolic authority to sustain it. The green suit carefully preserved yet never publicly worn (p. 40), becomes an emblem of suspended identity—caught between mimicry and inadequacy.

The contrast between Bombay and Washington further intensifies Santosh’s fragmentation. In Bombay, despite his subordinate social position, he possesses a sense of belonging, routine, and communal identity. His recollection of shared leisure—reading newspapers, playing cards, smoking together—suggests a stable, if modest, social world (p. 25). In Washington, however, this structure collapses. The unfamiliar environment produces what Hayward describes as a form of agoraphobia (Hayward 2002, p. 189), compelling Santosh to withdraw into confined spaces. His retreat into the “cupboard” among his possessions signifies not merely physical hiding but a regression into a protective psychic enclosure (Naipaul 1971, p. 25). When his owner Priya took him to watch a Hindu movie, he became terrified, wanted to come back to the security of home. When he saw, and watched the husbhi following him in a park, he quickly ran back to the safety of the restaurant. The external world—marked by the social codes of wearing shoes in public, and hostile presence of ‘wild’ hubshis—appears as an overwhelming symbolic order that he cannot decode.

It is interesting to note that Santosh’s artificial nature is reflected in the “unusual eloquence that Naipaul assigns to him” (Zhang 2013, p. 64). This is not without purpose. As Naipaul’s story does have connections, associations, and is inseparable from background (Hussein 1997, p. 155).

One of the key themes among the imperial writers was that the ‘character’ was the key.17 Other than the imperial hegemonic discourses, the novella, importantly, also gestures toward moments of discursive resistance. Santosh gets scolded from his employer for collecting a handful of Airlines trinkets in his journey: “in Bombay it didn’t matter what you did. Over here you represent your country… your behaviour has already gone so much out of character.” (Naipaul 1971, p. 30). The weed he had brought from India, he realized, had value and worth. He sold them dear, bought some cloths and other items (green hat and green suit) as he was now obsessed with look and appearance (p. 40). Even Priya—an Indian—is deceitful. In his worldview, crooks exist everywhere. He says he used to buy fifty rupees items that side and sell the same in fifty dollar this side (p. 47).

On the other hand, indigenous voices too are given space. Santosh’s remark that Westerners are “Franks and barbarians,” and his employer’s characterization of them as “malicious,” invert colonial hierarchies (p. 42), echoing strands of Indian intellectual critique of imperialism. Figures such as Sri Aurobindo had already exposed the rhetoric of “sympathy” as a form of patronizing domination—the “benevolence of the master possessed of absolute power.” (Aurobindo 2002, p. 548). As New Historicism reminds us, literary texts participate in the circulation of power, and Santosh’s voice becomes a site where competing discourses—colonial, nationalist, and indigenous—intersect.

In this sense, Santosh is not merely a victim of colonial displacement but a product of overlapping systems of power. His identity emerges at the intersection of colonial discourse, psycho-sexual repression, and indigenous social hierarchies. Naipaul’s irony lies precisely in this: Santosh’s tragedy is not that he lacks identity, but that he, while refashioning his identity, possesses too many—none of which he can fully inhabit.

7. Naipaul’s Authorial Irony: Parody of Hindu Rituals

In Naipaulian worldview, true satire emanates from “all-embracing Christlike” vision (Naipaul 1977, p. 24). His “narrative strategy, like that of the ethnographer, lies in touching the pitch of superstition without being defiled by it” (Hughes 1988, p. 79). He is not just telling a story; he is judging. He plays the role of the enlightened outsider, adopting a Christlike vision, as he critiques not just India but its inability to evolve. Naipaul’s narrator is like the king of Brobdingnag taking Gulliver (Santosh) on the palm of his hand and asking whether he was civilized, and steadfast: gifted with vision, or barbarian and fanatical: primitive and blind. This stance of the narrator is not free from the laws of relativism. In Naipaulian worldview, writing “is the product of a specific historical and cultural vision” (Naipaul 2008, p. 41). But to make his point of views relevant, and banal story appealing, he himself prescribes methods: “Don’t forget the flashback; and, to give density to a banal narrative, the flashback within the flashback” (p. 42). Peter Hugh remarked that: “In Naipaul’s fiction the eye that sees defilement never closes” (1988, p. 82) Hence his narrator summons courage to demonize or canonize individuals, dogmas, and institutions alike. This motif reappears in his fictional world including “One Out of Many”. To show that Santosh is a puppet, a parody of Eastern ignorance in a world ruled by Western rationality, he uses flashback techniques delving into the motifs of classical Hindu past and motifs, e.g., Aryan race fantasy, fantasy of purity, animal sacrifices, fastidious code of bathing, dietary taboos, expiatory rites, racial cruelties, and caste segregation. Indian’s defective visions are strengthened by some powerful religious symbols and rituals in everyday lives for anticipating prosperity and warding off the evil spirits. He mentioned many over a period. For instance, phallic emblems, and cutting of the pumpkin which stood in popular Bengali perception as vegetable substitute for animal sacrifice (Naipaul 1979, p. 10). However, I am going to stick to two motifs as per the reading of the novella:

(a)

Brass Plates

Together with the theme of purification, the colonial writers keenly observed and reported the ritual elements in Hindu way of life during worship including brass plates, and uncooked rice, etc. In their esteemed views, such cultural practices even though were superstitious, yet were exotic. These observations shaped how India was perceived globally—sometimes reducing deep cultural practices to mere symbols of the East. Abbé J.A. Dubois in Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (1905) discussed at length the various Hindu religious practices, customs, and symbolic items used for performing Puja. James Mill in The History of British India (1817) considered daily pujas, use of flowers, ghee, rice, etc., as backward practices that kept Indians intellectually inferior. Monier Monier-Williams in Hinduism (1894) mentions ritual plates and symbolic items such as uncooked rice, and sacred Tulsi plant. E.M. Forster in his novel A Passage to India (1924) in the Temple Scene describes Hindu rituals with lamps, rice, silver image of the God, communal singing, a painted earthenware jar wreathed with dried figs, in memory and ritualistic revival of the allegorical birth celebration of Lord Krishna by the inclusion of merriment (Forster 1924, pp. 279–86). In Forster’s opinion, this “was a muddle”, “a frustration of reason and form” (p. 180). In “One Out of Many”, even this communal ritualistic celebration of Krishna’s birth is repeated with different setting by the frenzied Indian crowds in Washington: “they were chanting Sanskrit words in praise of Lord Krishna” (Naipaul 1971, p. 34). There are similarities as well. To note just one. Whereas Godbole in the Temple Scene in A Passage to India was covered with dust and grease (Forster 1924, p. 285), the dancers in Washington were making a lot of dust because of their feet movement (Naipaul 1971, p. 34).

The novella is not bereft of such motifs. Santosh’s world is shaped by symbols of a classical religious past rendered hollow in modernity. Yet these items, once powerful, are now reduced to decorative tokens. He describes the private life of Priya in the following words:

I saw Priya’s collection of good-luck objects: a brass plate with a heap of uncooked rice, for prosperity; a little copybook and a little diary pencil, for good luck with the accounts; a little clay lamp, for general good luck.

(p. 46)

(b)

Bronze Gods

The image of ‘bronze god’, ‘bronze figures’ or ‘bronze bodies’ has captured the imagination of scholars, and critics as well. Conrad identified the images of “bronze figures” (Conrad 1995, p. 74) and “bronze bodies” (p. 82) with the crowds in Heart of Darkness to describe the black race people. However, in case of Naipaul, it is used for highlighting two different cultures: African and Indian.

In the novella, Santosh’s employer Priya transforms the apartment into a replica of a magazine layout “with books and Indian paintings and Indian fabrics and pieces of sculpture and bronze statues of our gods” (Naipaul 1971, p. 36). Similarly, the bronze gods in his employer’s apartment become museum pieces—lifeless and ornamental. When Santosh fears dishonour and racial impurity, he prays to these statues, but they do not respond:

She was always coming into the apartment. She disturbed me while I was watching the Americans on television. I feared the smell she left behind. Sweat, perfume, my own weed: the smells lay thick in the room, and I prayed to the bronze gods my employer had installed as living-room ornaments that I would not be dishonoured. Dishonoured, I say…

(p. 38)

His act becomes tragicomic. Naipaul uses these symbols to suggest that Hindu rituals, when displaced, become parodies of themselves.

8. Conclusions: Naipaul’s Colonial Gaze and the Trapped Hindu Male

Employing a New Historicist framework, this study arrives at the following conclusions:

First, it concludes that “One Out of Many” stages a profound crisis of masculinity, identity, and cultural memory. Santosh emerges not merely as a dislocated immigrant in America, but as a textual construct shaped by enduring colonial representations of the Hindu male. In this regard, Naipaul’s vision both aligns with [and opposes] earlier figures such as Kipling and Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who sought to recover an India defined by its “hard masculine valour” (Nandy 1983, p. 70), thereby implicitly contrasting it with a feminized and enfeebled present.

Second, Naipaul’s global reception further complicates this portrayal. His acclaim in the Global North suggests how postcolonial writing is often valorized when it appears to confirm Eurocentric assumptions. Santosh’s depiction as possessing an “underdeveloped” ego—read alongside psychoanalytic arguments associated with Sudhir Kakar—resonates with long-standing Western stereotypes of the ‘backward’ Hindu male. In this sense, the narrative participates in a broader literary economy that reproduces coloniality under the guise of psychological and cultural insight.

Third, by mobilizing Western psychoanalysis in conjunction with selectively framed colonial histories, Naipaul renders Santosh emblematic of India’s supposed incapacity for self-renewal. Santosh’s subjectivity is depicted as socially overdetermined: even his actions outside India appear symbolically tethered to structures such as the agrahara, suggesting an inescapable cultural conditioning. Rather than producing a universally relatable migrant figure, Naipaul transforms Santosh into a symbolic scapegoat for an imagined civilizational failure, thereby reinforcing an orientalist and masculinist logic that calls for critical scrutiny. In adopting this mechanism, Naipaul historicizes the ugliness.

Fourth, at the same time, Santosh’s gradual adaptation to an alien environment—his acquisition of basic commodities, his tentative engagement with language, and his immersion in everyday practices—can be read through a New Historicist lens as moments where competing cultural discourses intersect. These details reveal not only subjection but also negotiation, complicating a purely deterministic reading of his character.

Finally, this paper contends that Naipaul’s engagement with psychoanalytic discourse—particularly the notion of an “underdeveloped” male ego—is conceptually unstable and strategically selective. While Sudhir Kakar’s later work offers far more nuanced accounts of gender relations grounded in myth, family structures, and the “good/bad mother” paradigm, the framework underlying Naipaul’s portrayal aligns more closely with the psychosocial model of Erik Erikson, itself a reformulation of Sigmund Freud’s insights into identity and collective memory. Kakar’s adaptation of Erikson to the Indian context further complicates any straightforward attribution of influence, making Naipaul’s reliance on him appear both overstated and imprecise.

This alignment becomes more evident when read alongside Gandhi’s Truth, where Erikson interprets Gandhi through the intertwined lenses of phallic anxiety, mysticism, and Brahmacharya. The psychoanalytic vocabulary and interpretive emphasis in Erikson’s reading bear a striking resemblance to Naipaul’s later rendering of Gandhi in India: A Wounded Civilization. In both cases, Gandhi is framed less as a political thinker situated within a complex anti-colonial struggle and more as a psychologically legible figure whose asceticism and sexual discipline are read as symptomatic of deeper civilizational tensions.

Future research may extend this inquiry by examining similar constructions of Indian masculinity in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and A Bend in the River, while also placing them in comparative dialogue with Caribbean and African masculinities shaped by colonial modernity. Such work would further illuminate how literary representations continue to negotiate, reproduce, or resist the epistemic legacies of colonialism.