The Sahib in Late Eighteenth-Century Mughal India

To the Western consumer of romances about the Raj, whether in print or in cinematic form, the sahib is more often than not a sun-embrowned European male in a solar hat who acquiesces to that appellation bestowed on him by the natives. The OED definition is quite revealing: “Sahib” is a “respectful title used by the natives of India in addressing an Englishman or other European (= ‘Sir’); in native use, an Englishman, a European.” The apparent ideological neutrality of the OED definition belies the highly contested structure of feeling the sahib constitutes in the making of the Indian elite nationalist discourse of the nineteenth century. Ashis Nandy has pointed out the homology between the rise of heterosexual male dominance over other forms of sexuality in the larger Western culture in the early modern era and the growing British political and economic dominance over the conquered Indians in the nineteenth century: In other words, the English-educated elite Indian nationalists of the nineteenth century did indeed “respect” the official image of the hyper-masculine sahib that the British foisted on them, albeit grudgingly, because in their perception this sahib had conquered India by dint of this very masculinist ideology. Regarding the Indian nationalists in the early twentieth century who led armed resurrections against British rule, Nandy writes: “they sought to redeem the Indians’ masculinity by defeating the British, often fighting against hopeless odds, to free the former once and for all from the historical memory of their own humiliating defeat.” There were also those who eschewed violent means but still sought to reform Indian religions and society and, above all, subjectivity along British Protestant, utilitarian lines. Nandy’s summation of the work of such important nineteenth-century Hindu nationalist thinkers as Vivekanand and Dayananda amply illustrates the need felt by many Indians to be like the sahibs: Consequently, Indian nationalism attempted to assimilate the “manliness” of the conquering sahib in order to reinvigorate what it perceived to be an effeminate, emasculated, and infantilized Indian identity as much it strove to revive a pristine pre-colonial one. As Ruth Vanita puts it, “Drawing on Victorian values of earnestness, thrift, and industry, and their own religious orthodoxies, they [the elite nationalists] tended to advocate that every activity have a moral or social purpose.” Before the advent of the high British imperialism of the late nineteenth century, informed in equal measures by the utilitarian reformism and Protestant zeal of the preceding decades of the century and the concomitant rise of reactionary elite Indian nationalism, the sahib used to be a very different creature altogether. As I shall illustrate in my ensuing discussion of The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810), an account of the travels of a Mughal aristocrat, Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1805) in Britain, France, and in the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803, the sahib at this time was primarily an Indian of high birth even though the appellation was also sometimes applied to Europeans who lived among the native sahibs. The OED adds that “sahib” is “also affixed as a title (equivalent to ‘Mr.’ prefixed) to the name or office of a European and to Indian and Bangladeshi titles and names.” Sahibs in the late Mughal Empire belonged to different ranks, not all of which were hereditary, nor was the ranking system in the Mughal Empire as rigidly codified as in the British system. The Nawab (or the “Nabobs” in the Anglicized version common in the eighteenth century) sahibs, who were originally the military governors of the Mughal provinces, had become virtually autonomous rulers after the reign of the last Great Mughal …