Sahibdom

1978, Jan Morris (as James Morris), Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Chapter 23, p. 478, Many of the British, even now, failed to grasp their true relationship with India. The habit of sahibdom was too ingrained, the attitude of condescension, even mockery, still natural to them.

‘Oah!’ said Kim, firmly resolved to cling to his Sahibdom. ‘There was a box in the night that gave me bad talk. So I stopped it. Was it your box?’

That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not quite so womanly and good.

They would buy a cottage in the country, surround themselves with friends, books, their children, animals. They would be free for ever of the smell of pukka sahibdom.

But it was neither age nor sahibdom, but a much subtler intrusion that loosened the bonds between the children […]