Brown Sahib is a term used to refer to brown-skinned people who imitate the
Western—typically
English—lifestyle. It is also used to refer to those have been heavily influenced by Western—usually British—culture and thinking. It is mostly used as a derogatory term. By implication, a Brown Sahib goes beyond simply mimicking the Western lifestyle. A Brown sahib will usually have an unfair bias towards West vis-à-vis East. Now, down the years sometimes—albeit rarely—it is used just as an affectionate term for an anglicised south Asian, without any colonial critique.
Details
Brown Sahibs invariably dressed in Western clothes, loved Western food, music and the arts and professed a particular affinity for the
English language
English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...
. Though not geographically discrete, they were and are most often found in the three British
presidency towns of
Calcutta
Kolkata, also known as Calcutta (List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern ba ...
,
Bombay
Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial centre, financial capital and the list of cities i ...
and
Madras
Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...
, now the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai and Chenna (but not black-skinned south Indians), respectively. They also usually hailed from a higher social stratum than the mixed race
Anglo-Indian
Anglo-Indian people are a distinct minority group, minority community of mixed-race British and Indian ancestry. During the colonial period, their ancestry was defined as British paternal and Indian maternal heritage; post-independence, "Angl ...
s. Today they are also often jokingly referred to as '
coconuts' – brown on the outside, white on the inside or more recently
Oreos.
A similar term "
White Turks" is used for Turkish people who imitate the Western culture.
Examples of usage
* "Founder and prophet of the Spadecarriers is 60-year-old
Inayatullah Khan. A brilliant student at
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...
, Inayatullah talked
Urdu
Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
* with an Oxford accent, became known as "the brown sahib (white man)" in India." —
''Time'' (1941)
* "Nor does he want to become one what in Asia is called a 'brown sahib', a person who apes the mannerisms of the British." —William Ivor Jennings, ''The Approach to Self-government'' (1958)
* The writer
Tarzie Vittachi (a political exile from
Ceylon
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, also known historically as Ceylon, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal, separated from the Indian subcontinent, ...
) subdivided the category into "Brown Sahibs", "Black Knights" and "Off-White Blimps" in his 1962 book.
See also
Wabenzi
References
British India
Pakistani slang
Pakistani English idioms
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