The Brown British Gentleman: Colonial Identity in A Bride for the Sahib
Khushwant Singh’s short story puts a colonial mirror in front of post-independence India — and the reflection is deeply unsettling.
Who Is Sunny Sen?
At the centre of Khushwant Singh’s story is a man defined almost entirely by what he is not. Srijut Santosh Sen — nicknamed “Sunny” by Anglo-Indian schoolmates who found his real name inconvenient — is a Bengali civil servant who has, over the course of his education and career, become a stranger to his own country. He went to Balliol. He speaks no Indian language. He eats lamb chops and shepherd’s pie. He drinks Scotch. He listens to the Czech Philharmonic and thinks of Covent Garden.
Singh introduces him with a term that carries an entire history of colonial humiliation inside it: the Wog — the Westernised Oriental Gentleman. The label is given by the English “contemptuously,” yet the story makes clear that Sen has adopted it, even cultivated it, as a badge of distinction. His Indian colleagues seek his company because of this — because he stands outside the “vicious circle of envy and back-biting” that he associates with Indian professional life. His un-Indian-ness is, in his own telling, a social asset.
Internalised Colonialism
What Singh is anatomising here is a phenomenon that postcolonial critics like Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha would later theorise at length: internalised colonialism, the process by which the colonised subject comes to see themselves, their culture, and their people through the colonising gaze.
Observe how Sen perceives the Indians around him. His boss, Mr Swami, is described through a relentless catalogue of distasteful habits — the betel-stained mouth, the spittoon, the mispronounced English idiom. Santa Singh, his Sikh colleague, is dismissed as “loud and aggressive” and “like the rest of his race.” The chaprasis are reduced to “fawning smiles” and “stupid grins.” Every Indian Sen encounters is rendered as a comic type, a caricature — seen through colonial eyes that happen to sit in a brown face.
Sen does not merely tolerate this distance; he enforces it. Repeatedly in the story, he extends his hand across the table to keep visitors at arm’s length — a gesture so deliberate that Singh uses it three times. Physical contact with Indians “galls” him. When Santa Singh embraces him, Sen wipes his cheeks. He reads these moments of warmth as intrusions, and responds to them with what he considers the ultimate compliment to himself: he had “behaved with absolute rectitude — exactly like an English gentleman.”
The Third Stage and the Tentacles of Hinduism
There is one moment in the story where Sen’s guard slips, and it is revealing. On the morning of his wedding, waiting alone in his office, his thoughts drift to Hindu tradition — marriage as the grihasthasrama, the third of the four stages of life according to the Vedas. He catches himself thinking in these terms and is immediately “alarmed.” He describes Hinduism as extending its “tentacles” into every sphere of life — an image of something predatory, something to be escaped.
And yet this is precisely what he cannot escape. His mother — an orthodox Hindu widow, shaved head, white sari, bare feet — remains his deepest human connection. He eats her curried fish on special occasions. He takes her to Indian films every month. When she weeps for a grandson, he gives in. The India he claims to despise is, in the person of his mother, the India he loves most. Singh never lets this contradiction resolve. It simply sits at the heart of the man, unacknowledged.
A Symptom, Not a Monster
It would be too easy to read Sen simply as a villain — a colonised snob who drives his wife to suicide through cold contempt. Singh is more nuanced than that. Sen is produced by a specific history: a colonial education system designed to create exactly this kind of person, an administrative service that rewarded Anglicisation, a society that admired the “brown British gentleman” even as it resented him.
He is, in a way, a successful product of empire — and the story asks us to consider what that success costs. It costs him a language, a culture, an ability to belong anywhere. At the Gymkhana Club, watching European diplomats and Punjabi girls in bikinis, he thinks: “This surely is where he belonged.” But the pool empties, the bar closes, and he goes home to a wife he cannot speak to.
The title of the story carries a quiet irony. The “Sahib” is not a British officer. He is an Indian man in a newly independent nation — still wearing an empire that no longer exists.
Discussion Questions
- The story was published in 1967, two decades after Indian independence. Why might Singh have chosen this moment to write a character like Sen? What was he critiquing about post-colonial Indian society?
- Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry describes how colonial subjects imitate the coloniser but are never fully accepted by them, producing a figure that is “almost the same, but not quite.” How does Sen fit — or complicate — this model?
- Sen’s mother occupies a very different relationship to Indian identity than her son does. What does her presence in the story suggest about gender, culture, and belonging?
- Is there any moment in the story where Sen seems genuinely self-aware about his condition? What would genuine self-awareness look like for a character like him?
