Brown Sahib

'''Brown Sahib''' is a term used to refer to brown-skinned people who imitate the Western—typically English—lifestyle.{{citation needed|date=March 2011}} 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.{{citation needed|date=January 2014}} A Brown sahib will usually have an unfair bias towards West vis-à-vis East.{{citation needed|date=January 2014}} Now, down the years sometimes—albeit rarely—it is used just as an affectionate term for an anglicised south Asian, without any colonial critique.{{citation needed|date=March 2011}}

==Details== Brown Sahibs invariably dressed in Western clothes, loved Western food, music and the arts and professed a particular affinity for the English language. Though not geographically discrete, they were and are most often found in the three British presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, now the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, respectively. They also usually hailed from a higher social stratum than the mixed race Anglo-Indians. Today they are also often jokingly referred to as 'coconuts' – brown on the outside, white on the inside{{citation needed|date=March 2011}} or more recently Oreos.

==Examples of usage== * "Founder and prophet of the Spadecarriers is 60-year-old Inayatullah Khan. A brilliant student at Cambridge, Inayatullah talked Urdu* with an Oxford accent, became known as "the brown sahib (white man)" in India." —''Time'' (1941)<ref>{{cite magazine|title=India: Spadecarners|magazine=Time|date=June 23, 1941|url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,851149,00.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100624205311/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,851149,00.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=24 June 2010|accessdate=6 November 2011}}</ref> * "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)<ref>{{cite book|last=Jennings|first=William Ivor|author-link=Ivor Jennings|title=The Approach to Self-government|year=1958|publisher=Cambridge University Press|page=13|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=agJIAQAAIAAJ&q=%22brown+sahib%22}}</ref> * The writer Tarzie Vittachi (a political exile from Ceylon) subdivided the category into "Brown Sahibs", "Black Knights" and "Off-White Blimps" in his 1962 book.<ref>{{cite book|last=Vittachi |first=Tarzie |title=The Brown Sahib |year=1962 |publisher=Deutsch}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Vittachi |first=Tarzie |title=The Brown Sahib Revisited |year=1987 |place =New Delhi |publisher=Penguin |isbn =978-0-14010784-5}}</ref>

==See also== Wabenzi

==References== {{Reflist}}

Category:British India Category:Pakistani slang Category:Pakistani English idioms