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

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.