One Out Of Many By V. S Naipaul

‘‘A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.’’. (Garvey, 2017) .With reference to these words what is culture and how it could be defined? A culture is constructed upon the behaviours, beliefs, and common attributes associated with the people of a particular society in addition, to their values, customs, traditions, and rules in order to maintain their identity and distinctiveness from other civilizations. When different cultures come into contact with each other cultural encounters take place; its basic concept is to focus on how cultures interact, overlap, and change through these encounters. Cultural encounters carry various aspects which are clearly depicted in V.S Naipaul’s
From the Free State collection written by V.S. Naipul he embodies cultural estrangement and destruction, he depicts the identity formation and freedom through the protagonist the "American Immigrant" cultural encounters’ experience in the short story "One out of many". The story analyses the agonizing awful cultural adaption imposed upon a poor servant Santosh, who was displaced from Bombay pulled out to a new life in Washington to accompany his governmental employer although he was thrilled and enthusiastic when he was told about this invitation. He was more excited especially in his conversation with the tailor’s bearer when he said ‘‘it pleased me that he was jealous ’’ (Naipaul, 2008); he thought his
At the beginning of the story Santosh faced a problem with his Indian traditional clothes when he was on the plane, his simple dressing caught the attention of the people around him, he also saw that they are dressed in an awful way‘ ‘they were all dressed as though they were going to a wedding…’’. When then he saw how the Americans in the television and in the streets, he realized why people looked at his so-called ragged clothes in an unpleasant way, he felt how shameful he looked, so he decided to change his appearance when he got some money, he got rid of those ragged clothes and bought a green hat and a green suit that was bigger than him, it did not bother him, but what all mattered was that he had the same clothes as the American stars who appear on the television, but at the end of the story when he came to the reality that he lost his identity, the matter of the clothes became a meaningless thing for