Contemporary materialism in its varied configurations persistently challenges claims that the body can be relegated to a subservient position when compared to reason. In most pertinent colonial and postcolonial studies the body is seen as a text upon and by means of which signs of difference are instituted. Yet to be able to test and appreciate to what extent the postcolonial body was and remains today a battleground for discursive control it is helpful to start with the awareness of the somatics of the traveller himself his agreement to and with his own person or lack thereof visvis other bodies his translation of the somatic into the semantic. The travellers body when rendered in writing becomes a symbolic construct which enters into a relation with the represented world and the nature of this multifaceted troubled alliance if alliance it is forms the main theme of this book.