# Empowering the Colonial Picaro: Resurgences of Kipling's Picaresque Novel in *The Impressionist* (2002) by Hari Kunzru

Dire la puissance du picaro colonial : résurgences du roman picaresque kiplingien dans *The Impressionist* (2002) de Hari Kunzru

Élodie Raimbault

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

https://publications-prairial.fr/representations/index.php?id=1676

DOI : 10.35562/rma.1676

## Référence électronique

Élodie Raimbault, « Empowering the Colonial Picaro: Resurgences of Kipling's Picaresque Novel in *The Impressionist* (2002) by Hari Kunzru », *Représentations dans le monde anglophone* [En ligne], 29 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 décembre 2025, consulté le 11 décembre 2025. URL : https://publications-prairial.fr/representations/index.php?id=1676

## Droits d'auteur

CC BY-SA 4.0

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Prairial
Pôle éditorial
Lyon Saint-Étienne
# Empowering the Colonial Picaro: Resurgences of Kipling's Picaresque Novel in *The Impressionist* (2002) by Hari Kunzru

*Dire la puissance du picaro colonial : résurgences du roman picaresque kiplingien dans The Impressionist (2002) de Hari Kunzru*

Élodie Raimbault

## PLAN

Introduction

The postcolonial reclaiming of the picaresque

The picaro

Structural similarities

Rewriting the imperial identity-making machine

A critique of empire

Reversing Kipling's "fantasy of the white subject"

Resurgence of the colonial world

The material imagination

History and memorialization

Conclusion

## TEXTE

### Introduction

1. By starting *The Impressionist* with an epigraph from Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel *Kim*, Hari Kunzru acknowledges from the onset the intertextual dimension of his novel.

"Remember, I can change swiftly. It will all be as it was when I first spoke to thee under Zam-Zammah the great gun—"

"As a boy in the dress of white men—when I first went to the Wonder House. And a second time thou wast a Hindu. What shall the third incarnation be?"

—Rudyard Kipling, *Kim*. (Kunzru 1)
2

The dialogue originally appears in chapter 5 between an orphan boy raised by an Indian woman, Kim, and an elderly lama, his friend and mentor who travels across Northern India in search of the Buddha's holy river. In the early chapters, 13-year-old Kim discovers his white ancestry, and is recognised by the British as the son of an Irish soldier. The lama bears witness to spectacular changes in the boy's social identity as Kim learns how to transform his appearance and his behaviour, so that others will believe he belongs to any community, social class, caste or ethnicity. Wishing to take advantage of his hybrid identity, the British take over Kim's education to turn him into a spy. In particular, they teach him how to impersonate countless different ethnicities and social groups so as to travel through India without being identified as a British agent.

The character's ability to change identities has become a core motif in the tradition of detective stories.¹ Also a prominent element in texts representing the colonial situation, this motif mirrors colonial patterns of mimicry and hybridity, as defined by Homi Bhabha:

> [...] colonial mimicry is the desire for a formed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. [...] The line of descent of the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Naipaul [...]. He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English. (Bhabha 85-86)

While learning to take part in colonial regulation and power by otherizing himself culturally, physically and linguistically, Kim consecutively experiences an exhilarating sense of empowerment and an identity crisis. His talent for indeterminacy paradoxically both facilitates and compromises his participation in the Great Game. ² In *The Impressionist*, Hari Kunzru's main character, Pran, shares many of Kim's characteristics, but takes even further the ambivalence of mimicry, that is “at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha 86), and ultimately threatens the imperial power.
3 Pran's trajectory in the 1920s echoes Kim's search for his true identity. Pran is also a half-outsider: the secret offspring of Forrester, a British colonial surveyor, and Amrita, an Indian woman who died in childbirth, Pran was raised as the spoilt son of a high-caste Hindu who had unwittingly married the pregnant Amrita, until his mixed origins are dramatically revealed and he is brutally cast away at the beginning of the novel. Facing many hardships and bearing witness to historical events, the orphaned youth moves through space and up the social scale, trying to survive and find his place in India, in England and finally in Africa, by impersonating successive identities.

4 Kunzru was awarded both the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for *The Impressionist* (2002). Born in England to an Indian father of Kashmiri descent and a British mother, Kunzru grew up in the suburbs of London, graduated in philosophy at Warwick university, and now lives in New York. The great success of his first novel set him on the path for an international literary career. He "moved between worlds socially as well as geographically, and [...] [his life journey has] also made it possible for [him] to discuss places of economic and cultural power with an insider's gaze" (Jeanniard du Dot 16). Often described as one of the new voices of postcolonial literature, in that he explores the point of view of racialized outsiders like Pran, Kunzru is "fascinated by the porousness and speed of the contemporary world, where identity is uprooted from its geographical soil and dispersed through the circuits of global capital" (Childs and Green 61). Writing the story of Pran, Kunzru engages with picaresque texts by Cervantes, Voltaire, Thomas Nash or Henry Fielding (Kunzru and Aldama 113-114) and with canonical colonial intertexts, among whom Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*, E. M. Forster's *A Passage to India* and Rudyard Kipling's *Kim*. In particular, he repurposes Kipling's dynamic motifs of travel, hidden identity and self-definition.

5 In both *Kim* and *The Impressionist*, the main characters' social trajectories can be read as a story of empowerment of subalterns. ³ Despite a movement of social elevation that echoes the tradition of the *Bildungsroman*, the picaresque frameworks of both novels create limitations to and variations from such an archetypal storyline. Moreover, Kunzru's 21st-century rewriting of a colonial story generates a resurgence of certain aspects of the imperial experience
that were kept hidden, or implicit in the hypotext. The title
*The Impressionist* indicates that the novel deals with impersonation;
identity changes indeed structure the succession of chapter headings
specifying the names Pran adopts (in turn, “Pran Nath”, “Rukhsana”,
“White Boy”, “Pretty Bobby”, “Jonathan Bridgeman”, “Bridgeman, J. P.
(Barab.)”) until the last chapter which bears the novel’s title. It also
raises the issue of performance, suggesting Pran becomes a kind of
entertainer, playing on the slippage between mimicry and mockery.
The cultural reference to Impressionists must also be interrogated:
artistic Impressionism explored new ways to represent the material
world and the impressions of the moment and, in like fashion,
Kunzru’s text explores the relationships between memory, perception
of the outside world and identity.

6

The ways in which Kunzru's text converges with Kipling's will first be studied, considering how the type of the picaresque character is repurposed in the postcolonial context. Kunzru also builds upon the open, loose structure of Kipling's novel, taking further the latter's analysis of how imperial structures can be seen as “the machinery of imperial government” (Kunzru 98) which creates new identities. Finally, the specificity of Kunzru's version of the tale of the colonial *picaro* will be analysed: in particular, his materialist approach of history and his ability to make the imperial reality resurface through a material imagination include a discussion of imperial violence precedingly suppressed by Kipling.

The postcolonial reclaiming of
the picaresque

7

Bart Moore-Gilbert expressed the idea that “the enduring appeal of *Kim* for South Asian writers, and its flexibility as a template, is indicated in its recurrence as an intertext in *The Impressionist* (2002) by Hari Kunzru” (47). The idea that *Kim* provides a prototypical narrative of the postcolonial search for identity is also explored by other critics, among whom Muhammad Safeer Awan, who argues that Kipling’s linguistic inventions inspired many Indian and Pakistani authors:⁴ “Kipling must be acknowledged as a source of inspiration, at least in terms of the employment of a ‘hybrid’ language, for a number of writers who adopted (and adapted) English as the
medium of their creative writings” (2–3). Although Kunzru does not
strictly speaking belong to such a group of writers, as he was born in
England and English is his own native language, he purposely uses
such kiplingian strategies to convey the impression of a vernacular
language in an English text, with phrases emphasising idiosyncrasies
in the speech of Indian characters, words seemingly translated from
Urdu or Hindi, or vernacular words transliterated in the Latin
alphabet; for instance, the photographer who partakes in Pran’s
misfortunes at a Nawab’s palace is called a “picture wallah”
(Kunzru 87). Kipling’s *Kim* also was prototypical of postcolonial
narratives in its revitalization of picaresque tropes, among which the
choice of a rogue as the main character.

The picaro

The picaresque derives its name from the Spanish *picaro*, meaning
“rogue”. The genre is a kind of biting satire, centred on the career of a
hero who lives by his quick wits. Usually he is clever, cautious, and
not without malice. Claudio Guillén writes that “the *picaro* both
incorporates and transcends the wanderer, the jester, and the
have-not” (67). He mingles naiveté and awareness, simplicity and
cunning. Kim is presented as a cheerful version of the *picaro*:
a friendly, witty, funny and easy-going boy, nicknamed “Little friend
of all the world” (Kipling 155), he lives among the
crowds. In *The Impressionist*, Pran immediately appears much more
malicious and dangerously self-centred. Due to “his arrogance or his
unappealing practical jokes” his household considers him a threat:
“the boy was a curse” (Kunzru 28–29). Pran is witty and resourceful,
but also dishonest, immoral, and cynical. He attempts to rape a
servant under the eyes of her own mother, Anjali, who brings about
his downfall. Presented by the narrator as “personifying fate, doom,
justice, karma and all manner of other vast impersonal forces given to
crushing antlike mortals underfoot” (Kunzru 38), Anjali was present
on the day when he was conceived and is the last remaining witness
to the truth of his origins. She belatedly reveals his true identity as a
bastard so as to punish Pran for his attack against her daughter,
which leads to his banishment from the household.
9. Pran's trajectory as a *picaro* suddenly turns him into a subaltern, in Spivak's sense of the term. Exiled from his early life of luxury as the pampered son of a high-caste, conservative and very distinguished Kashmiri lawyer, Pran has to start his career as an impressionist at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, lonely and without the ability to speak for himself. Over the course of the first chapters, Pran becomes in turn a beggar, a prostitute, a slave. In the section of the novel during which Pran is named Rukhsana, he is kept in a palace *zenana*, an area where women and girls are secluded, and is to be turned into a eunuch. The debased luxuries enjoyed by the colonists and the upper classes create a grotesque parody of Orientalist literature which turns into a bleak realistic story of sexual violence and slavery.

10. Pran's experience is much more violent than Kim's. While Kim's hardships as a vagabond and a disoriented orphan are alleviated by his numerous friends' support, Pran has to cope with a hyperbolic accumulation of bullies and attackers, beginning with his family circle but gradually including the whole city:

> Pran lies in the dust, smelling the onion-stink on his clothes. A crowd gathers, fascinated by the unprecedented events unfolding before their fortunate eyes. The chowkidar brandishes a lathi and Anjali gives a reprise of her miscegenation speech, adding that the evil boy has, to cap it all, just caused Pandit Razdan's untimely death. Then the door is slammed shut, the bolt drawing across it with a heavy metallic rasp. [...] Out of the crowd arcs a lump of dung, which hits him, hot and wet, on the back of the neck. (Kunzru 41-42)

Pran loses his privileged communal identity as he is cast away and despised by even the lowest castes. When he is told that he looks Eurasian, he tries to ask for help from the Anglo-Indians⁵ of the Agra Post and Telegraph Club. Through the eyes of Eurasian character Harry Begg, the narrator shows how the Anglo-Indian community practises a form of colonial mimicry that Kunzru satirises by highlighting how it makes the rhetoric of racism and imperial hierarchies resurface:

> They, the Anglo-Indian community, know where their loyalties lie. They know which side of themselves they favor. They wear their hats
and read all they can of Home and avoid the sun like the plague,
feeling pain with every production of melanin in their skin. Of course
they do not call it that. They have other names. Dirt, grubbiness.
(Kunzru 47)

Despite his physical resemblance to the Anglo-Indians, Pran is driven
out of the club and beaten by Harry Begg, in a fit of rage. While he
ironically fails to join this biological community, it is precisely the
same Anglo-Indian talent for mimicry that will enable Pran to survive
in an exceedingly violent environment, and to move up socially.

As per Bhabha's analysis of the ambivalence of mimicry, it appears
that Pran's talent stems both from a necessity to conform and from a
desire to mock: once he understands his new hybrid identity, Pran
takes advantage of the colonial system, and his story is a vehicle for
satire. The satirical dimension of both *Kim* and *The Impressionist*
corresponds to the *picaro*'s traditional role of exposing the flaws of
his contemporaries, like a jester.⁶ Hybridity and mimicry apparently
empower the *picaro* characters of Kim and Pran: imitating the British
enables them to navigate the strict social framework of the Raj. It also
transforms them into archetypes experiencing an existential identity
crisis originating in the colonial encounter.

11

Structural similarities

In *Literature as System*, Claudio Guillén explains how the genre of the
picaresque has evolved from a simple, linear sequence of episodes
focused on the *picaro*, a structure he describes as

12

[...] loosely episodic, strung together like a freight train and
apparently with no other common link than the hero. Since *Lazarillo*,
however, other narrative devices have been superimposed on this
basic structure. The use of recurrent motifs, circular patterns, and
incremental processes is particularly frequent in the picaresque. The
first-person form supplies an additional framework. These various
devices create an objective or a subjective order beneath or above
the linear sequence of events. [...] This type of narrative allows for
endless stories-within-the-story. It can have a sequel, or remain
incomplete, or both. (84-85)
Such highly intricate structures abound in both *Kim* and *The Impressionist*. In his memoirs, Kipling described his novel as “of course, [...] nakedly picaresque and plotless” (Kipling 1991, 133). This provocative statement specifies the story’s basic structure, particularly the picaresque forms of the episodic structure and the open ending. However, the frequent interspersion of micro-narratives⁷ gives the novel a more intricate form, despite its apparent shapelessness.

The motif of mosaic-building has a metatextual function in *Kim*, suggesting that the reader’s hermeneutic role is to piece together many episodes and thus reveal the whole image. Kim’s master Lurgan breaks an earthenware pot in front of his eyes and then teaches Kim to train his mind to visualize both the broken object and its intact form.

13

> There was one large piece of the jar where there had been three, and above them the shadowy outline of the entire vessel. He could see the veranda through it, but it was thickening and darkening with each beat of his pulse. Yet the jar—how slowly the thoughts came!—the jar had been smashed before his eyes. (Kipling 201-202)

The mental reconstruction of the shattered form is provoked by a syncretic vision, even if it is based on an illusion. Kim almost magically visualizes the complete form, but does not forget that the fracture is real. The ideal and the real are simultaneously revealed to him. Not only does Kim prove able to see beyond appearances and to look for a motif behind the disorder of reality, but he also starts learning how to piece together his own broken identity, which is alluded to allegorically here.

This motif of the mosaic is also one of the prominent intertextual echoes that appear in *The Impressionist*. In a scene when the character is in an altered state of consciousness, like Kim in the preceding quotation, Pran's sense of self is similarly described as being “in pieces” and “[a] pile of Pran-rubble”:

14

> Pran moving outwards from the centre, gathering momentum. Whoever might be in charge, it is certainly not him. “Him”, in fact, is fast becoming an issue. How long has he been in the room? Long enough for things to unravel. Long enough for that important faculty
to atrophy (call it the pearl faculty, the faculty which secretes
selfhood around some initial grain), leaving its residue dispersed in a
sea of sensation, just a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled
from a primal soup of emotions and memories. Nothing so coherent
as a personality. Some kind of Being still happening in there, but
nothing you could take hold of.

You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endless repeated day of
Brahman—before any act of creation the old world must be
destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the
next chance even to put it back together in a new order. (Kunzru 65)

After showing the limitations of the metaphor of the pearl, which
figures identity as a precious, layered and self-made unit, Kunzru
reuses the image of the broken whole in a more radical manner,
suggesting that the ideal unit cannot be recreated once it has been
broken, and that only a new, restructured, hybrid identity may
emerge out of this scene of desolation.

Rewriting the imperial identity-
making machine

A critique of empire

15

The structures of empire are pictured in Kim, particularly the
Anglo-Indian educational system when Kim is sent to school to better
adopt his social identity as a Sahib: “St Xavier’s looks down on boys
who ‘go native all-together.’ One must never forget that one is Sahib,
and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command
natives” (Kipling 173). The school instructs future administrators of
the Raj technically and morally, shaping their consciousness of being
imperial executives. Janet Montefiore has shown how Kim’s Jesuit
education aims at “emulat[ing] the aristocratic Roman virtues of
gravitas and authority” (Montefiore 114). Teaching Western
Enlightenment, notably via the study of arithmetic and cartography,
St Xavier aims at giving Anglo-Indian students the strength to resist
what Europeans saw as Indian magical thinking through a “rational”
mastery of reality.
16

Yet, Kipling does not fundamentally present the imperial structures
as oppressive. They are not the reason for Kim's lack of stability: the
cause is rather to be found in the circumstances of his birth and early
youth, following the framework of the picaresque plotline that
favours notions of chance and fortune. Conversely, Kunzru's critique
of Empire anatomizes the imperial ability to shatter individual
identities, a destruction shown to be relentless. Kunzru pictures the
Empire as "a vast machine in which subjectivities are produced, fixed
in place and re-circulated" (Childs and Green 69), foregrounding the
absurdity of the process of identity-making. In a transitory phase,
Pran survives by becoming "Pretty Bobby", a young man who
entertains British soldiers, ingratiating himself by playfully imitating
their various accents. A self-taught chameleon, Pran loses himself
while imitating others, gradually becoming more and more spectral:

Bobby's capacity for mimicry helps in his world. He can reduce
British Other Ranks to fits by imitating regional accents. Oroight
there, mate? Och, ye dinnae wanna worrit yersel'. Now then, sirs, if
you please to follow me I know a very good place... Bobby deals in
stereotypes, sharply drawn. [...]

Bobby is a ghost, haunting thresholds, pools of electric light. He
hovers at the limit of perception, materializing in his collar and tie
like someone only semireal, ethereal enough to trust with your
secrets, safe in the knowledge that he would melt in direct sunlight.
(Kunzru 231)

Kunzru's use of eye-dialect is reminiscent of Kipling's in his early
Anglo-Indian short stories, published in the 1880s and 1890s. Kipling
made an impression upon his metropolitan readers due to his
realistic exoticism, visible particularly in the imitation of a variety of
Anglo-Indian, Indian, and British dialects. Janet Montefiore interprets
this in the context of the emergence of modernist experimentations:

Proto-modernist mimicry is closely bound up with Kipling's imperial
theme through the way his writing "layers" its standard English
against the lively oral vernaculars: the Irish brogue and stage
cockney spoken by his soldiers (turned later to very different
modernist ends by T. S. Eliot and Bertolt Brecht) and the rich,
archaised English which is Kipling's approximation to the Indian
vernacular mixture of Urdu and Hindi [...]. (112)
Indeed, in both *Kim* and *The Impressionist*, the characters'
multilingual abilities and their mutability lead to their existential
instability, as they experience identity as a performance which
challenges the notion of a core self.

After stealing the administrative identity of an Englishman, Jonathan
Bridgeman, and making sure that he can physically pass as white,
Pran travels to England and discovers that he needs to practice
innumerable rituals denoting Englishness. To ensure the quality of his
performance in a selective public school, Pran applies to his own life
the academic methodologies of anthropology and sociology, taking
fastidious notes about social behaviour and upper-class etiquette.

17

The school is a machine for producing belonging, and accordingly
everything is done in groups, from showering in the morning to the
composition of essays in evening prep. Every gesture of Jonathan's
day is honed to its functional minimum by two hundred years of
institutional evolution, like some upper-class version of Mr Taylor's
factory system. [...] In his notebook he writes, *Englishness*
*is sameness*, and, *The comfort of repetition*. [...] Jonathan notes all
this down: *nobility of discipline, respect for religion important but
belief optional, check your plate first*. His notes spread out into all
areas of school life, from the rules of rugby football to the
construction of a jam sandwich. Week by week his understanding of
this world improves, the white spaces on his map filling up with trails
and landmarks. (Kunzru 306-307)

This explicit comparison of the school system's moulding of identities
to Taylorism suggests it partakes in the oppression of individuals like
an industrial process. Pran's mastery of European methodologies is
also signalled by the reference to cartography in the Conradian
metaphor of the white (or blank) spaces which appears in *Heart
of Darkness*.⁸ Pran maps the territory of Englishness, preparing for
his conquest of Jonathan's social class. Knowing in detail about his
new environment helps his performance of whiteness and
Englishness in general, but also, more crucially, of a specific class
ethos. Kunzru analyses Pran's adaptation to a high-end English
education in prep school and in Oxford as a scientific endeavour that
mirrors the imperial strategies for using the European explorers'
scientific findings in the fields of cartography, ethnography and
philology. This exemplifies Foucault's articulation between power and
knowledge: Pran uses his knowledge to conquer England, and his
performance of Englishness causes him to really experience
Englishness, in turn making him more English.

Reversing Kipling's "fantasy of the white subject"

18 In an interview, Hari Kunzru explained his parodic
intertextual intentions:

Kim is the fantasy of the white subject who can see the hidden
easternness of things. I wanted to change that round, to make
western whiteness the exotic thing. [...] I wanted to write in praise of
the unformed and fluid. ⁹ (Feay 17)

Kipling's empowerment of his *picaro* does express an Orientalist
desire to know India so as to conquer it: *Kim* offers the Western
reader the pleasure of identifying with a white character who has a
genuinely endotic¹⁰ relationship to India, thus fulfilling the “fantasy
of the white subject”. Kunzru’s comic reversal of this Orientalist gaze
is one of his parodic tropes, found in the first page of the section
“Jonathan Bridgeman”, where Europe is ironically exoticized and
eroticized: “Ah, the mystic Occident! Land of wool and cabbage and
lecherous round-eyed girls!” (Kunzru 281). Such a reversal could be
considered as a powerful postcolonial strategy, critical of
Orientalism, yet the brevity of the passage and its comic tone blunt
the sharpness of the criticism, by caricaturing the issue.

19 Kipling's Orientalist inclination to scatter in his fiction information about vernacular languages, religions, and other Indian particulars actually exceeds the mere creation of picturesque local colour: his type of idealized realism has been repeatedly acknowledged as predominantly truthful by Indian and Anglo-Indian readers. For instance, the complexity of the character of the lama proves Kipling's ability to fully characterize a Buddhist, and to ground his story in reality. The lama, a scholar and a priest, teaches the Buddha Dharma and strictly follows his pilgrimage; yet, his contact with Kim and a variety of other characters leads Kipling to develop the character's
20

interpersonal relationships, showing him as able to learn from others
and to adapt to his companion's cultural outlook.

However, when Kim's ability to take on different identities is likened
to reincarnation, the references to Hinduism or Buddhism are
deceiving: the lama's interpretation of Kim's shifting identities in
terms of incarnations (in the epigraph chosen by Kunzru for instance)
is incorrect. Kipling suggests that Kim's shifting identities are a kind
of transmigration determined by his karma and that they are caused
by the Indianness of his life. In fact, his identity changes are
pragmatic, elusive, and superficial. The incessant transformations
lead Kim to experience a deep but temporary identity crisis, which
cannot be interpreted as a form of retribution for past actions,
therefore fundamentally differing from reincarnation. Kim's crisis is
likened to a hypnotic trance that does not lead to any illumination:

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves
into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and
over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation
as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the
power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man
at any moment.

“Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?”

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all
other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-
points. In a minute—in another half-second—he felt he would arrive
at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always
happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a
wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his
head. (Kipling 233–234)

21

In *The Impressionist*, Pran's successive identities are also called
“incarnations”, but always superficially, in relation to the metaphors
of clothes (Kunzru 283) or skin covering and hiding the character:
“Maybe he should revert to an earlier incarnation. Or should he go
on? Is Sweet's blackness another kind of skin he could put on and
inhabit?” (Kunzru 403–404). Although Pran's attempts at empowering
himself through his talent for impersonation are repeatedly thwarted,
his indomitable persistence highlights the force of another fantasy:
contrary to that of the white subject identified by Kunzru in *Kim*, the
fantasy of the *picaro* concerns his ideal ability to free himself of all
social, racial and gender constraints. Ironically, when taking part in a
debate, Pran (now Bridgeman) is overwhelmed by his impersonation
and shocks his audience by using the caricatural kiplingian cliché of
the white man's burden:

J. P. Bridgeman [...] responding to Mr Barker's mention of the
importance of the League of Nations, treated the House to a long and
somewhat otiose statement of the White Man's mission to "farm the
world". [...] he stood up and began to speak about America, a speech
which soon became about the West and then slid into the clash of
colour and the tide of racial movement on the shores of humanity
and whiteness whiteness whiteness until he realized what he was
doing and sat down. Sometimes it just comes out, the guilt. He has to
watch for it. (Kunzru 335)

22

Psychologically and symbolically, Pran fails to achieve the *picaro's*
freedom from social and racial categories. Echoing Kunzru's avowed
desire to “praise the unformed and fluid”, the impressionist's
strategies of empowerment repeatedly end up in failure, Pran's
inability to fix his identity resonates with the postcolonial issue of the
fluidity of identity.

Resurgence of the colonial world

The material imagination

23

Hari Kunzru explained how he used the picaresque to recreate the
colonial world from a satirical point of view, using his character as
a pretext:

I was writing a picaresque very consciously with books on my
mind like *Tom Jones*, *Candide*, and Nash’s *The Unfortunate Traveller*.
The central character is very much this type of hero—an outsider
with a skewed pair of eyes looking on a crazy world. And, like the
heroes of picaresque novels, he is something of a blank slate; he lacks
an identity. So, the colour of the book doesn’t come out of any
psychological depth of his character, but rather as he moves from
set-piece scene to set-piece scene as the pageantry of empire plays
out all around him. (Kunzru and Almada 113)
24 In the picaresque, as Guillén argues, there is a “general stress on the material level of existence or of subsistence, on sordid facts, hunger, money. [...] Hence a profusion of objects and details. There are no *relicta circunstantia*—no topics, persons, or things unworthy of interest and compassion” (83). Accordingly, Kunzru produces highly detailed descriptions and realistic narrations of momentous natural phenomena and traumatic events, using internal focalization and impressionistic notations to heighten the evocation of the materiality of events. Numerous passages from *The Impressionist* detail bodily functions, physical pain or pleasure.

25 In the section “White Boy”, Pran, disoriented and uninformed, discovers the immediate aftermath of the 1919 Amritsar massacre— the internal gaze focuses on details, objects and his sensory perceptions, in the present tense. The narrator then enlarges the perspective and intervenes in the passage to offer a comprehensive evocation of the historical event, from other points of view:

> Pran is left standing by a charred heap of rubble, the ruined shell of the Alliance Bank.

> Terrible things happened here. Horrors. The place bears its memories near the surface, memories of heavy wooden bank furniture dragged out on to the street and doused in kerosene.

> The image of Mr Thompson, the manager, his screaming face blackening in the flames as he is cremated by the chanting mob. [...] All around the city, memories. Burning and looting. After the banks, the post office. The police station. The English shops in the Hall Bazaar. White men beaten to death. Mrs Easdon, the zenana hospital doctor, splashing her face with a bottle of black ink, struggling into a sari while downstairs bottles were smashed in the dispensary and the Anglo-Indian nurses raped. Elsewhere, in the quiet town of Jalandhar, the general's dinner party is interrupted by a telegram.

*(Kunzru 177)*

The picaresque focus on material details and the fluidity of shifting points of view are impressionistic; due to shock, the character's visual perception is disconnected from his ability to interpret phenomena. An analipsis detailing the moment of the massacre foregrounds the visual perception of a secondary character, with a metaphor which creates emotional distance:
The soldiers knelt and for the briefest moment, like a premonition,
there was silence.

Then, without warning, they started to fire.

Das saw the first wave of bodies fall, a breath of wind
rustling a cornfield. Then he was caught up and pulled away.

(Kunzru 177–178)

The impressionistic description of the scene viewed by Pran is
accompanied by the narrator's decoding of the events. The cultural
references introduced by the narrator—for instance, the toponyms
Amritsar (Kunzru 175) and Jallianwala Bagh (Kunzru 178) and the
pro-independence slogan “Mahatma Gandhi ki-jai” (Kunzru 176)—
contextualize the story and heighten the reader's impression that the
story is colliding with history. The micro-narrative about a white
woman hurriedly trying to protect herself against Indian rapists by
wearing a sari and darkening her complexion echoes the rape
endured by Pran, also disguised in a sari (Kunzru 86), during the
previous section.¹¹ The motif of rape also works as an intertextual
echo to Mutiny Novels, a sub-genre of Anglo-Indian historical fiction
set during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, in which many stories of
interracial disguise are to be found in the context of violence against
women. Among common tropes of the Mutiny Novel, Jaine
Chemmachery highlights the Gothic combination of sensationalism,
“excess in representation and graphic detail”, with the motif of
unspeakable horror, “[constructing] the event as both horrific and
impossible to narrate” (7). The intertextual resurgence of this colonial
genre helps the reader interpret the scene of violence witnessed by
Pran in Amritsar as a cornerstone in the history of modern India, but
the ideological reversal between colonialist Mutiny Novels and
*The Impressionist* leads us to understand in a different light Indian
acts of violence against British representatives of the Raj.

History and memorialization

26

*The Impressionist* does not use trivial details and material perceptions only as tools for building historical realism. The novel's focus on materiality also participates in the creation of a literary site of memory. Pierre Nora's concept of "lieux de mémoire" considers the crystallization of memory around an entity which has become a
symbolic element of the memorial heritage of a community. Historical novels certainly entail both a reconstruction and a commemoration of history, becoming sites of memory if they reach a significant audience, as Kunzru's novel did. Following Nora's typology, Kunzru's approach of the historical novel can be seen as modern and polyphonic, in the sense that it is an "attempt to write a history in multiple voices. [...] a history less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions remembered or even commemorated than in the traces left by those actions and in the interaction of those commemorations" (Nora xxiv). In this perspective, Pran's status of picaro enables Kunzru to represent the violence of the 1919 massacre and to question the ways in which it can be memorialized. As Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot explains:

> [...] through Pran's gaze, the crumbling of imperial power is made visible and observable, whereas he "hurries past" the place where Indian protesters were killed. [...] the fires of the riots and of the massacre convey their own erasure, leading to memories that are "near the surface" yet require the active observation of traces in order to be excavated. (96-97)

27 The picaro's agency is limited, but his ability to see and remember leads to a resurfacing of past events, particularly of traumatic scenes. Taken as a rewriting of Kim, Kunzru's novel appears strikingly explicit: mentioning and describing the violence of the British Raj constitutes a response to Kipling's choice to suppress and ignore such events in his idealized vision of the colonial situation.

28 It seems particularly apt that the 1919 massacre is evoked in a scene set on the location of the massacre, but a few days after it. The process of resurgence is shown to arise from the material traces left behind and Pran's discovery of Jallianwala Bagh transforms the text into a site of memory of colonial violence, that needs to be acknowledged as such. The text shifts from historical narrative in the preterit ("Soon bodies were strewn over the parched brown grass. That was how it started") to the present tense of memorialization on the next line: "Gradually the city walls materialize through the heat haze" (Kunzru 176).
29

This process is contrasted to other modes of memorialization in the novel. From the perspective of the memsahibs who managed to escape, the events of Amritsar are interpreted in teleological and patriotic terms: "something in these memsahibs has been elevated by their plight. It connects them to history, to their grandmothers of the Mutiny, to the symbolic destiny of the Englishwoman in tropical climes, which is to make do, to endure" (Kunzru 183). The heroization of suffering colonial representatives is another common trope of the Mutiny novel, which expresses the ethos of the Anglo-Indian social group in which Kipling was raised. By contrast, Pran's sufferings remain individual, unheroic, and useless in his search for a community.

30

When Pran studies in England as Jonathan Bridgeman, the narrator playfully alludes to another missed opportunity: while he could have been considering the meaning of history and the dynamic notions of individual and national identity, his professor only presents a conventional view of English history through pageantry and essentialist generalizations:

> His place in the history sixth could have been useful, allowing him to add a diachronic understanding of his subject (Englishness) to the synchronic. But in the sleepy classroom of Mr Fox, pipe-smoker and Sunday painter, history is not so much about change as eternal recurrence. The boys are taught to trace the destiny of their island through a series of devotional tableaux, jewel-like moments which reveal essences, principles, axioms drawn out of race and blood.
> 
> (Kunzru 307)

This aestheticization of England, shown to be idealized, ahistorical and eternal, evokes stereotypical Orientalist images. The text thus criticises historians like Mr Fox for considering history as passive and repeated remembrance. Hari Kunzru's novel aims at a more ambitious, active process of memorialization. Writing *The Impressionist* as a literary site of memory, Kunzru participates in the postcolonial movement foregrounding the decolonial impact of bearing witness to past colonial societies. He has thus managed to respond to postcolonial needs and create an accessible story that renews and subverts the traditions of 19th-century historical fiction.
Conclusion

31 Hari Kunzru's rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's novel plays on the readers' expectations, repurposing the picaresque and the popular adventure tale in the postcolonial context. The social pressure of the colonial context on a picaresque character is analysed in both novels, which use fiction and the motif of identity changes to engage with the readers' fantasy of escaping the limitations of constrained identities. The postcolonial specificity of Kunzru's version of the tale of the colonial *picaro* entails a materialist approach of history and a powerful discussion of imperial violence precedingly suppressed by Kipling.

32 Despite paying homage to the traditional genres of the picaresque and the historical novel, *The Impressionist* can be seen as an example of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in *Poetics of Postmodernism*. Indeed, the novel both parodies the grand narratives of the British empire produced in the 19th century, that are its main intertexts, and offers a resurgence of those texts. Its play on intertextuality and its conscious confrontation of history with metafiction suggest that it challenges literary canons from the inside.

33 Because Kunzru merges a historical approach with the picaresque, the shift towards allegory in the final section of the book finds its place in this discussion of memorialization. Pran is taking part in a British anthropological expedition studying the Fotse society in Africa, when he undergoes a crisis, abandons his scientific activity and again changes his identity. The scene of Pran's scarification at the hands of a sorcerer is intended to end his infinite search for identity, "orienting him, linking him irrevocably to the time and the place these marks are being made, so that wherever he may drift or fall asleep, he will always be in relation to this instant" (Kunzru 461): the scar is called a "braille of scar tissue" (Kunzru 465) in the final paragraph, signalling the crucial association of materiality and text. Like a scar, the novel acts as a form of memorialization of past violence, whose resurgence determines the subject's identity.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE

AWAN, Muhammad Safeer. "Teaching the Empire to Write Back: Locating Kipling's 'English' in the Postcolonial Literatures of the Subcontinent". *NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry*, vol. 14, no. 2, December 2016. <https://jci.numl.edu.pk/index.php/jc/i/issue/view/15/89> (accessed 13 January 2025).

BHABHA, Homi. *The Location of Culture*. London: Routledge, 1994.

CHEMMACHERY, Jaine. "Mutations of the 'Mutiny Novel': From Historical Fiction to Historical Metafiction and Neo-Victorianism". *Commonwealth Essays and Studies*, vol. 42, no. 1, 2019. <https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.741>.

CHILDS, Peter and GREEN, James. *Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels*. Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

CONRAD, Joseph. *Heart of Darkness* [1899]. New York / London: Norton, 1971.

FEAY, Suzi. "The Man Who Would Be Kim". *Independent Sunday*, 31 March 2002, p. 17.

FORSTER, Edward Morgan. *A Passage to India* [1924]. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.

GUILLÉN, Claudio. "Toward a Definition of the Picaresque", in *Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History*. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

HOPKIRK, Peter. *Quest for Kim*. In *Search of Kipling's Great Game*. London: John Murray, 1996.

HUTCHEON, Linda. *A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction*. London: Routledge, 1988.

JEANNIARD DU DOT, Maëlle. *Places in the Making: The Po/ethics of Place in the Fictions of Mohsin Hamid and Hari Kunzru*. 2023. Université Grenoble Alpes, PhD dissertation. <https://theses.hal.science/tel-04165637> (accessed 13 January 2025).

KIPLING, Rudyard. *Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings*. Thomas Pinney (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

KIPLING, Rudyard. *Kim* [1901]. London: Penguin, 2000.

KUNZRU, Hari. *The Impressionist* [2002]. London: Penguin, 2003.

KUNZRU, Hari and ALDAMA, Frederick Luis. "Postcolonial Imaginings: A Conversation with Hari Kunzru". *Interdisciplinary Literary Studies*, vol. 8, no. 1, Fall 2006, pp. 110–117.
MERLE, Isabelle, "Les Subaltern Studies : retour sur les principes fondateurs d'un projet historiographique de l'Inde coloniale". *Genèses*, 2004/3, no. 56, pp. 131-147. <[https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.056.0131](https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.056.0131).>

MONTEFIORE, Janet. "Latin, Arithmetic and Mastery: A Reading of Two Kipling Fictions", in *Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (eds), *Modernism and Empire, Writing and British Coloniality*, 1890-1940*. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 112-136.

MOORE-GILBERT, Bart J. "'I Am Going to Rewrite Kipling's Kim': Kipling and Postcolonialism". *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature*, vol. 37, no. 2, 2002, pp. 39-58.

NORA, Pierre. "Preface to English Language Edition: From Lieux de mémoire to Realms of Memory", in *Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past*. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. xv-xxiv.

RAIMBAULT, Élodie. *Le géomètre et le vagabond. Espaces littéraires de Rudyard Kipling*. Grenoble: UGA Éditions, 2021.

SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. *Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988*.

TER MINASSIAN, Taline. *Sur l'échiquier du Grand Jeu. Agents secrets et aventuriers (xIXe-XXIe siècles)*. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2023.

NOTES

1 The character of Strickland, introduced by Kipling in several short stories and in *Kim* as one of the young spy's teachers, is an undeniable ancestor of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, both for his predisposition for disguise and for his qualities as a virtually unofficial detective, on the fringes of regular administration, wandering freely among the local population.

2 The phrase "Great Game" refers to the Anglo-Russian rivalry in central Asia and to the diplomatic, military and intelligence actions conducted in that context. See P. Hopkirk, *Quest for Kim. In Search of Kipling's Great Game* and T. Ter Minassian, *Sur l'échiquier du Grand Jeu. Agents secrets et aventuriers (XIXe-XXIe siècles)*.

3 The term "subaltern" refers to the lower social classes and those displaced to the margins of a society; in the colonial context, a subaltern is a native person subordinated due to their community, class, caste, race, ethnicity, or gender. The field of Subaltern Studies is a branch of postcolonial theory aiming to reveal the suppressed history of the subalterns of empire. G. C. Spivak explained that contrary to other oppressed classes, the subaltern is silenced, has no history and is thus
prevented from collectively organizing. See G. C. Spivak, *Can the
Subaltern Speak?*; and I. Merle, "Les Subaltern Studies : retour sur les
principes fondateurs d'un projet historiographique de l'Inde coloniale".

4 Giving examples of appropriation of English by Indo-Pakistani writers, Muhammad Safeer Awan lists Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Ahmed Ali in the colonial period, and Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidhwa and Khushwant Singh, in the post-1947 period. Among their strategies of appropriation and indigenization of English, he lists "glossing, untranslated words, syntactic fusion, code-switching, vernacular transcription, lexical innovation, translation equivalence and contextual redefinition" as directly inspired by Rudyard Kipling's writings (Awan 4).

5 In *The Impressionist*, the term Anglo-Indians means “Eurasians” and does not refer to the English who have settled in India as in Kipling’s stories.

6 "The picaro [...] observes a number of collective conditions: social classes, professions, caractères, cities, nations. This rogues' gallery has been a standing invitation to satire. And, of course, to comic effects. [...] Let us not forget that the picaro himself is the narrator and the satirist. As a 'half-outsider', his moral credentials are equivocal, though not his expert sense for fraud and deception" (Guillén 83–84).

7 On Rudyard Kipling's structural use of micro-narratives, see É. Raimbault, "Invention d'un espace textuel et littéraire", in *Le géomètre et le vagabond*, pp. 239-242.

8 *Heart of Darkness* is an explicit intertext of Kunzru's. The metaphor appears in this famous passage: "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. [...] True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names; It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery —a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over" (Conrad 8).

9 Quoted in M. Jeanniard du Dot, p. 48.

10 "Endotic" describes something that is banal and familiar, as opposed to exotic.

11 In the section "Rukhsana", Pran is held captive in the zenana of the palace at Fatepur. The prince offers him to the British Major to be raped, so as to
blackmail the Major to forward a political plot (Kunzru 92).

## RÉSUMÉS

### English

Hari Kunzru set his first novel *The Impressionist* (2002) in the colonial period and played with imperial intertexts. By starting his historical novel with an epigraph from Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel *Kim*, Hari Kunzru explicitly acknowledged that *The Impressionist* is a rewriting: not only does the character of Pran share many of Kim's characteristics, but as *picaro- types* they also both indicate a generic approach to travel narrative that is specifically picaresque. Pran's trajectory in the 1920s echoes Kim's search for his true identity. A half-outsider, Pran is the offspring of a British colonial surveyor and an Indian woman, raised as if he were a high-caste Hindu until his mixed origins are dramatically revealed and he is cast away as a stranger by his Hindu family. Facing many hardships and bearing witness to historical events, the orphaned youth moves through space and up the social scale, trying to find his place in India, in England and finally in Africa, by impersonating successive identities. With Pran's story Kunzru repurposes Kipling's dynamic motifs of travel, hidden identity and self-definition, bringing to the fore issues of mimicry and hybridity in a book which reworks *Kim*'s episodic and open-ended structure. This paper considers how Kunzru's rewriting of Kipling conveys his interest in the postcolonial questioning of stereotypes and social constructs: Kunzru makes the colonial world reappear in its materiality, developing Kipling's material imagination to even greater lengths by including explicit scenes of violence through a profusion of details having to do with objects and the body. Kunzru starts a dialogue between *Kim* and his novel, between satire and moments of pastiche, leading to a consideration of postcolonial identity that goes beyond issues of inclusion. The novel subverts the grand narratives of the British empire and offers a resurgence of memory. Associating materiality and text, *The Impressionist* acts as a form of memorialization of past violence.

### Français

Hari Kunzru situe son premier roman, *The Impressionist* (2002), dans la période coloniale et joue avec les intertextes impériaux. En commençant son roman historique par une épigraphe du roman *Kim* (1901) de Rudyard Kipling, Hari Kunzru reconnaît explicitement que *The Impressionist* est une réécriture : non seulement le personnage de Pran reprend-il de nombreuses caractéristiques de Kim, mais en tant que *picaros*, ils témoignent tous deux d'une approche générique du récit de voyage spécifiquement picaresque. La trajectoire de Pran dans les années 1920 fait écho à la quête de Kim pour sa véritable identité. Pran est le fils d'un géomètre colonial britannique et d'une Indienne. Il est élevé comme s'il était un hindou de haute caste jusqu'à
ce que ses origines hybrides soient dramatiquement révélées et qu'il soit
rejeté comme étranger par sa famille hindoue. Confronté à de nombreuses
épreuves et témoin d'événements historiques, le jeune orphelin évolue dans
l'espace et parcourt l'échelle sociale, essayant de trouver sa place en Inde,
en Angleterre et enfin en Afrique, par le biais d'identités successives. Avec
l'histoire de Pran, Kunzru reprend les motifs dynamiques du voyage, de
l'identité cachée et de l'autodéfinition de Kipling, mettant en avant les
questions de mimétisme et d'hybridité dans un livre qui retravaille la
structure épisodique et ouverte de Kim. Cet article examine comment la
réécriture de Kipling par Kunzru traduit son intérêt pour la remise en
question postcoloniale des stéréotypes et des constructions sociales :
Kunzru fait réapparaître le monde colonial dans sa matérialité, développant
encore plus l'imagination matérielle de Kipling en incluant des scènes
explicites de violence, via une profusion de détails liés aux objets et aux
corps. Kunzru entame un dialogue avec Kim, entre satire et pastiche, qui
débouche sur une réflexion sur l'identité postcoloniale qui dépasse les
questions d'inclusion. Le roman subvertit les grands récits de l'empire
britannique et propose une résurgence de la mémoire. Associant matérialité
et texte, *The Impressionist* constitue une forme de commémoration de la
violence passée.

INDEX

Mots-clés

Kunzru (Hari), Kipling (Rudyard), picaresque, littérature postcoloniale,
intertextualité, mémoire

Keywords

Kunzru (Hari), Kipling (Rudyard), picaresque, postcolonial literature,
intertextuality, memory

AUTEUR

Élodie Raimbault

elodie.raimbault[at]univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Élodie Raimbault is a senior lecturer in British literature at Université Grenoble Alpes, and a member of the ILCEA4/LISCA laboratory. Her recent research explores the representations of space in literature and the connections between text and images, particularly through a study of literary cartography, material imagery and technological analogies. Her 2021 book *Le géomètre et le vagabond : espaces littéraires de Rudyard Kipling* (UGA Editions) examines the links between literature and geography in Kipling's work, notably through the question of cartographic representations.
IDREF : https://www.idref.fr/171132599