Indian Government and Politics

Chapter 4

1 Varindra Tarzie Vittachi, the Sri Lankan-born UK journalist and writer in his Brown Sahib Revisited (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1987), has portrayed South Asian elites who took over from British colonial rulers and behaved as ‘the made-over brown Englishmen who inherited the mantle of colonialism’. Lord Macaulay, while advocating the introduction of English education in India in his Minute on Indian Education, 1835, conceptualized a class of Indians ‘…who may be interpreters between us and the million whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect’. This became the colonial policy in time to come and aimed at creating ‘brown sahibs’.

2 R. P. Dutt has analysed ...