Ruskin Bond was born to a British father, Aubrey Alexander Bond, and a supposedly Anglo-Indian mother, Edith Dorothy, at Kasauli Military Hospital in Himachal Pradesh, India on 19 May 1934. It is useful to bear in mind from the outset that I will be working with Bond's own sense of the self rather than any objective truth about his lineage or descent. Whilst he is undoubtedly aware of his father's British heritage, his mother's lineage is far more mysterious, even to him. I will return to this matter in greater detail later. Before that, however, let me introduce the subject of the self/other dialectic – referred to in the title of this study – which seeks to deal with the author's anxieties of identity.

Bond's life (and, for that matter, his semi-autobiographical literature) is an allegory of the colonial aftermath. For him, India is a place in which, in his youthful days, he overcame daunting rejection in order to work out a congenial absorption. Suitable absorption accommodates both integral and differential styles of living. It caters to ‘identity’ formation in so far as the term refers to both similarities with and differences from others or ‘the other’. His is an unusual but exemplary attempt at the absorption of a member of a minority ethnic community whose role in the shaping of the postcolonial Indian psyche is not seriously addressed elsewhere. This is an attempt to explore the dialogue between the biographical and authorial selves of the man whose subjectivity is informed by the fantasies of space and time.