Brown Sahib is a term used to refer to natives of South Asia

South Asia

South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...

 who imitate Western - typically English - lifestyle. It is also used to refer to those have been heavily influenced by Western (usually British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

) 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.

For comparison, see Sahib

Sahib

Sahib is an Urdu term which literally translates to "Owner" or "Proprietor". The primary Arabic meaning of Sahib is "associate, companion, comrade, friend" though it also includes "Sahib is an Urdu term which literally translates to "Owner" or "Proprietor". The primary Arabic meaning of Sahib...

.

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. They also usually hailed from a better social strata than the mixed race 'Anglo Indians'. Today they are also often jokingly referred to as 'coconuts' -- brown on the outside, white on the inside.

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 magazine (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)

In popular culture

"The Brown Sahib" is the title of a book by the Ceylon journalist/writer (Varindra) Tarzie Vittachi [1921 - 1993], published in London by Andre Deutsch in 1962 and again as "The Brown Sahib Revisited" by Penguin Books at New Delhi in 1987. The book delineated various forms of the phenomenon visible in the post-colonial era, including "The Brown Sahib," "The Black Knight" and "The Off-White Blimp."