Places are spaces where interaction of cultures, people and trades take place.

Conventionally, villages, inhabited by natives and conceived as bounded sites of residence which stand as metonyms for a whole culture, have long been the focus of anthropological fieldwork. But, cultures are not in places in any simple sense. The focus on rooted, authentic or native culture and experience fails to address the wider world of intercultural import-export in which the ethnographic encounter is always already enmeshed (James Clifford :1992). Places are sites of travel encounters as much as sites of residence. One should be attentive to a cultures farthest range of travel, while also looking at its centres; to the ways in which groups negotiate themselves in external as much as internal relations; to the fact that culture is also a site of travel for others and that one groups core is anothers periphery. (Clifford, 1992:1079). In the context of centuries of imperialism and cross-cultural contact, the conventional model of cultural exchange which supposes the existence of a pure, internally homogeneous, authentic, indigenous culture that gets subverted or corrupted by foreign influences is no longer workable. In fact, every culture has absorbed in foreign elements from external sources, and those elements are gradually naturalised within it. i One can read it as metaphor of decolonizing the colonized mind. Ashis Nandy writes about how colonialism colonises the mind and unleashed cultural forces within colonized societies, thereby forever altering their priorities. Arguing from the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category, he states that the West is now everywhere, within the West and outside, in structures and in minds (1983: xi). This decolonization of the mind is central to liberationa process that transcends the end of colonial occupation, and from liberation begins another way of self-determined life. For Edward Saids Orientalism is about the Western world consistently rewriting the identity of the East to match a Western fictional construct. The emphasis is on the recognition of difference as rooted in ideas of hegemony that the West has somehow seen itself and its cultural institutions as superior and non-western culture is its inferior Other. Homi Bhaba sees these interactions differently. But Bhabha suggests that the effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism cannot be read as simple dialectical power struggle between self and Other, or to a discrimination between mother culture and alien cultures the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority. (1995:34) Bobbys mimicry for the colonized is almost the same, but not quite. Mimicry is not the real thing, mimicry is only a copy. Because of the unusually fluid moral outlook imposed on him by his work, Bobby often finds himself lost. Though the Macfarlanes have given him a home, there are certain barriers to emotional honesty. No one else takes an interest in him. He belongs to no group or gang. There is nothing much he feels connected with at all. Bombay is large, and the violent flows which surge through it are enough to scare highly trained British administrators, with uniforms and codes of honour and portraits of the king to give them backbone. (242) Elspeth told him that he was losing direction and he should be proud of your (his) nation. Think of its future. You should be proud of what you are. (256) Paying special attention to how he dresses and how others, esp. colonizers perceive him, Bobby is reduced to a creature of appearance. He becomes a creature of surface because of his extreme selfalienation. Without any scope for self-development in a proper normal way, he has to choose the only option available to him appearance.

To be English is insulation :
After the finale exam, (402) In France on the way to Africa, he felt: He is foreign here. Even as Jonathan, he is foreign here It is vertiginous, terrifying. (406) Star said to him not to be so English. There to be English is to be foreign. As he is not rooted to any culture as such, he does not have the cultural confidence which Kenneth Ramchand states as knowing who you are and why you are in the midst of all the convulsions that are changing your life. It is a difficult knowledge to achieveand it can never be fixed or finalKnowing who you are and why you are in a dynamic and provisional way makes it easy for you to be open to, and selective about, influences from outside yourself. At the same time, it makes it very difficult for those who want to tell you what you should be. So the confrontation between coloniser and colonised is inherently paradoxical. Kunsru uses humour to analyse and question any notions of colonial cultural superiority and to undermine attitudes that are patently false

and liable to continue generating conflict if not confronted and stripped of their illusory power. The narrative seeks to deconstruct the notion of fixity and purity in the terms of nation, community, history and subjectivity. Kunsru confronts these issues in a humorous, ironic or even grotesque, for he sees identity construction as inextricably intertwined in a contested landscape and fixed concept of self is not possible. Kunsrus protagonist is reminiscent of Bhabhas postmodern subject who is full of movement, where no subject is centred or settled; but what is also important is the idea of negotiation of identity. He is like those who, in the words of Salman Rushdie, have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time. He is caught up in the trope of the beyond, and moving between, we might say, in-groups and out-groups: we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion [] It is in the emergence of the interstices the overlap and displacement of domains of difference that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. (1994: 1-2) Bhabha argues that mimicry has a menacing side as it has the potential to become mockery and parody. Mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. (Bhabha: 86) In case of Bridgemans mimicry, there is no visible menace about it in the sense of dismantling colonial authority. he has something happens to him which dislodges the security of his present identity. When Mrs Macfarlane is arrested because of her connection to Indian nationalists, he feels sorry for breaking her beliefs, for spying on her life and on others for Mrs Pereira. After she is gone he comes to realize that she is old and she loves him. Yet he knows that he will have to leave the house when she comes back. With the pain of losing one identity comes the freedom of taking on another new one. Pain gives way to celebration. Exile may also offer liberating possibilities. Kaminsky notes that the experience of physical and emotional rupture can lead to personal growth and transformation. Through the discovery of an inner capacity "to survive and grow in the new environment" (37), one may find a greater independence and confidence and thus gain a more fulfilling self-affirmation and realization. Kaminsky compares this act of self-discovery to rebirth, an emergence of new personhood and subjectivity. As the epigraph to this article states, the exilic rebirth is inevitably connected to death, "the death of the person one has become in a particular context." However, Kunsru does not portray his character as someone helpless and incapacitated by his existential circumstances of exile. Pran is depicted as transcending this absence by transforming exile into a site of selfaffirmation. He is allowed to gain confidence and affirmation not only through the "capacity to survive and grow in the new environment" but also through the willingness to seize opportunities for self-transformation found in the new location. Evidently, this individual liberation comes with the painful process of death and rebirth and is attained in traumatic circumstances. This is precisely why its meaning is so powerful and valuable. His self-alienation comes from inhabiting in a part of the hybrid cultural space of the colonial and the colonized. Bhabha says: The margin of hybridity, where cultural differences contingently and conflictually touch, becomes the moment of panic which reveals the borderlines experience. Bobbys feelings of unbelonging and uprootedness are a part of the borderline experiences.
travel is an ongoing activity with no terminal point, no objective way of assessing it in terms of better or worse. Instead of seeing travel as a mode of experiencing the world that is devalued by the minute, we are better served with travel as a constant renegotiation of different and equally valid modes of mobility; an activity that is not any worse, or better, than it was a hundred or a thousand or two thousand years ago. (Postcolonial Travel Writing, 10)

These movements changes how you think about yourself or how others think about you, how different negotiations take place at different level to make oneself intelligible to the surrounding world and the world intelligible to you. It is more like locating himself in different places and nations, utilizing different cultures and usurping different identities. Without this mobility, there cannot be any changes of his identity. As he does not have any sense of self as such, he accepts all the identities given to him in the course of his journeys. In his case, the other becomes his self. So there is a merging of other and self. Generally, a journey is an encounter with the other, thats, the unfamiliar, the exotic and the foreign. Then, travel brings the other closer to the self till it grows to be familiar and becomes self. Acting as a guide, after the tourists had gone away tittering at the hermaphrodite figure of Shiva, he touched the statue for luck. Yet he is shocked when Mrs Mafarlane once tells him that he is losing direction, that he should be proud of his nation. Think of its future. You should be proud of what you are.(256) He retorted to her So what am I? (257) and walked away. He neither belongs to the Hindu community nor to the colonial British one. He is confused and lost. He is living with this confusion positively as a creature of surface. To a man without direction and future, talks of direction and future

have no point. He will never be truly at home in a place as he is forced to continually negotiate and transform. A hybridizing focalization occurs, the novel suggests, when the impressionistic, fuzzy edges between classified identities are met with abjection. Thus, because the main characters hybridity remains consistently situated in, and focalized through, racist and puristic ideologies, personified by specific characters, the novel prevents the generalization and celebratory usage of the term hybridity. Hybridity, then, cannot fully account for the elusive character that is at the centre of the narrative. Indeed, the term cannot form the conceptual backdrop against which the impressionist will move into sharp focus (Boer, et al: 208). Then there is the travel of Pran to the land of Occident, he called it the mystic Occident! Land of lecherous round-eyed girls (289) No didactic or moral purpose, no teleology, just rootless movement living with identities or impersonation he takes on the way, to a more impressionistic style with the interest focused as much on the travellers responses or consciousness as their travels. Edward Said notes that a rift between a human being and a native place often results in an alienation from the self (173). state of lack. Denied home and integrity everywhere, his life is confined to the space of absence and loss, or what Said calls a perilous territory of not-belonging " (177) In her analysis of Latin American women's writing in exile, Amy Kaminsky theorizes exile as a particular form of "presence-in-absence." She emphasizes its spatial configuration, pointing out that exile is primarily "from, and not to, a place" (1993:30). As a physical topicality constituted by departure, exile is defined by "what is missing, not by what it contains," and its conditions of loss and emptiness foster "a will to return into presence" (Kaminsky 1993: 32). Desire to reclaim presence is manifested, Kaminsky states, in perpetual longing, nostalgia, a wish to return, and a fear of return to the place where one can no longer be. Consequently, exile is experienced as dislocation, both physical and psychic. Identities, either of self or other, were no longer stable. Homi Bhabha has influentially written of the colonists anxieties provoked by their colonial servants, so white in their ways, and yet not quite; these mimic men were, I would argue, just one of the disturbingly uncategorisable products of colonialism. Travel, imperialism and the resulting mixtures of cultures and people. Postcolonial critic like Edward Said argues that the Orient is a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. In short, Orientalism is Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Discourse of Orientalism made it possible for the cultural hegemony of the West over the East. Said states that orientalism, an idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying us Europeans as against all those non-Europeans built up the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. The hegemony of European ideas about the Orient themselves reiterated European superiority over Oriental backwardness. Therefore, orientalism should be read as a discourseby which European culture was able to manageand even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period. The structure of Oriental construction provided the historical conditions of European colonialism and imperialism.(Said, 1979: 3) Said explored both the range of Orientalism and the ways in which it authorized and thereby controlled the Orient. Powerful European conceptions of the Orients determined that it was not a free subject of thought or action. Orientalism controlled the nature and shape of knowledge, as well as how it was produced and disseminated. Serving very real material interests, the numerous texts of Orientalismin philology, ethnography, political science, art and literatureplayed a vital part in constructing an Orient that allowed for the deployment of specific forms of control over it. Cultural texts play a part in the colony and empire, of race and its deployment, so that the two hundred years of European imperialism had to be understood vis--vis the cultural texts that laid the groundwork for and buttressed the structures of imperialism. Arjun Appadurais contends that natives, people confined to and by the places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger world, have probably never

existed (Appadurai, 1988:39) Cliffords arguments are well supported by those of Gupta and Ferguson (1992), who argue that people have undoubtedly always been more mobile and identities less fixed than the static and typologising approaches of classical anthropology would suggest, not least because that conventional anthropological approach allowed the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power (ibid.: 89). As cultural hybridity is, increasingly, the normal state of affairs in the world, and in this context, any attempt to defend the integrity of indigenous or authentic cultures easily slips into the conservative defence of a nostalgic vision of the past. Travel, despite its lopsided

power equation, opens up space where face-to-face, direct encounter takes place unsettling ones notion of other and in turn, self. The distance is reduced or almost .
Paul Scott's portrait of the character Hari Kumar in The Raj Quartet was that of a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. The colonial Britain self defines her people, and by extension the nation itself, by setting up the other, thats, those who dont belong it. On the contrary, in Kunsrus narrative, we have a mixed boy with the white skin which highlights the limitation and unfeasibility of such absolute distinction between Indian and Englishman in the context of the colonizer and the colonized, thereby blurring the boundaries between self and other. Kunsrus choice of an epigraph from Kiplings 1900 colonial novel Kim underlines the fluidity and hybridity of identity of the English boy burned black as any native who could dress as an Indian and pass as a native in the bazaars. The epigraph to Kunsrus narrative: "Remember I can change quickly ... " and "What shall the third incarnation be?" points towards the non-fixity of the identity of his protagonist Pran Nath. Pran Nath inhabits the hybrid space brought about by cultural encounters, the borderzone of the East and West, the colonizer and the colonized. This inbetween space, this borderzone, may well be called the third reincarnation. The narrative shows that such movement demands cultural complicity, ambivalence and exile. Through the protagonist, he also indirectly addresses the issue of the exile and the expatriate who has taken the adopted culture (here British) as their own. Kunsru argues that the purity of blood and monism of identity on which people build nation and empire are doubtful categories. His tale underscores the fact that as blood, identity and history are basically hybrid in character, the questions of racial superiority and inferiority are almost insignificant. Well, if he is a hybrid, where does or where should a hybrid belong? Here he is pushed out by Indian, the Britisher and the hybrid community, where is his place. Nowhere? He in a painful way discovers that identity is just like a mimicry. Mimicry itself is identity. Mimicry is temporary and provisional and so it identity. Like a postmodern he doesnt seem to despair over this fate, he seems to take it as the best possible option available to him. despite his pain, one can say, he celebrates it. As the idea of home as a place where one is rooted for life makes no sense to a man like Prannath, he no longer feels homesick. For him, life may well be a journey, which definitely has an origin but no definite destination. So, curse or boon, the idea of homecoming does not seem to arise at all. Issues of knowledge, power and identity.. free mobile agency.. power is involved here also as his provisional identity is his way of controlling the reality as he finds in different situations. His is a case of receiving and appropriating on the periphery the dominant (here colonial) mode of representation. While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis beginning, perhaps, with the latters obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself. (Imperial Eyes, 6) He is a migrant, yet not a migrant. He is a part of British Empire yet not a part of it. he is an exile yet not an exile. Displaced not yet displaced. Spread of imperialism is part of modernity, and Kunsrus temporary identity (a postmodern feature) is a response or reaction to imperial modernity. The human subject was not inherently free but hedged in on all sides by social determinations. The very idea of the subject is a social construction, produced through social discourses (language, thought, symbolic representations) which position subjects in a field of power relations and within particular sets of practices. (Foucault) Meaning is a product of the internal relations between elements of the discourses which define and facilitate the social practices of individuals. people live their lives through the socially

constructed meanings that are available to them. The practices that people engage in in daily life act back upon, and thus come to shape, discourse, just as the discourses themselves shape practices. But these are social phenomena, individuals themselves do not create these meanings or the practices that they inform. In The Impressionist, we have an anti-hero in Prannath, Kunsru brings out a protagonist with a talent for impersonation and mimicry traversing and inhabiting the borderzone between the colonial culture and that of the colonized. Appearances are everything to him. Pran Nath, a deterritorialized man, is a rootless stranger everywhere, neither an insider nor an outsider. And if the emptiness of Africa he comes face to face with his empty self. Kunsrus narrative shows how imperialism brings about miscegenation of cultures and histories and how this miscegenation breaks down our traditional understanding of self, culture and history. While mimicry of the powerful Imperial culture is one strategy of the colonized, it takes place at the cost of self, if one has a self at all, which in the case of Pran nath, one cannot say he has a self to lose, to lament about. While colonial masters want to create a barrier between the colonizer and the colonized, they can stop the miscegenation of blood and cultures. So even in colonial time, ones cultural self is not that stable and fixed. So not only in the new postcolonial landscape, but also in the old colonial times, it was fluidity rather than fixity, changeability rather than stasis, which underpin the formation of culture, belonging and identity. But Kunsru takes up the theme of hybrid and mimicry in a humourous manner. Humour becomes an instrument to break free from the deadlock or ambiguities coming from the intermingling of selves, cultures and histories. So in this context, the tale highlights the practical unfeasibility of claims for pure cultural absolutism or an unproblematically static and rooted cultural identity.

Kunsrus novel foregrounds the theme of intermingled histories, intertwined narratives and hybrid selves, the practical unfeasibility of claims for pure cultural absolutism or an unproblematically static and rooted cultural identity. So the very idea of nation carries with it the notion of transnationalism. Trans means across or beyond, or in a position reaching from one side to the other on or to the farther side of : at a greater distance.
Travel writing, then, has a complex relationship with the situations in which it arose. In this essay it is taken to mean a discourse designed to describe and interpret for its readers a geographical area together with its natural attributes and its human society and culture. Travel writing may embrace approaches ranging from an exposition of the results of scientific exploration claiming (but rarely managing) to be objective and value-free to the frankly subjective description of the impact of an area and its people on the writers own sensibilities. There was, in fact, a tension between supposedly scientific discourses on discoveries and travel writing of wider sympathies. Exploration and travel may indeed be distinguished even if there is a large grey area between them. As the relationship between Britain and the wider world changed during this long period, there were many pressures tending to make travel writing not only more precise and scientific but also more obviously utilitarian, more explicitly concerned with issues of trade, diplomacy, and prestige. Three broad phases may be distinguished. In the middle and later eighteenth century, the beginning of the end of the old mercantilist empire of plantations, slavery and Atlantic trade is apparent. A swing to the East and to Africa may be detected. The era from about 1830 to 1880 is the period of Victorian non-annexationist global expansion characterised by considerable confidence about Britain and its place in the world. From 1880 to 1914 is a period of severe international competition and territorial annexations accompanied by considerable anxiety. Subjects of concern ranged from Britains military and naval capabilities and the health and fitness of its young men to the signs of the breakdown of the certainties of the Victorian bourgeois synthesis in intellectual and cultural matters. (Roy Bridges. Exploration and travel outside Europe (17201914) The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 2002: 53-54) A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the 'advanced' dominated the 'backward'; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title

of, 'emperors' was at its maximum. (E J. Hobsbawme, The Age of Empire: 1857-1914.Londan: Vintage Books,1989, 1986 :56) Clifford, J. Travelling cultures, in L.Grossberg et al. (eds) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. 1992) Ivison, Douglas (2003) Travel Writing at the End of Empire: A Pom Named Bruce and the Mad White Giant, English Studies in Canada 29(34): 2001.

(David Morley and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995. 128-130)