Chandigarh: In quiet contrast to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decolonising campaign to shed Raj-era road names, symbols and mores, one notable outlier remains: a small but fading group of privileged Punjabi males-now mostly in their mid-seventies – who still carry themselves, in manner, bearing, and dress-for want of a better description-like Englishmen trapped in Indian bodies.They are typically retired civil servants, military officers, lawyers, former box-wallahs, and gentleman farmers – men shaped by the lingering echoes of a late-colonial and early post-Independence world.Their numbers are few – and steadily dwindling – yet they still form a recognisable social type across several cities and smaller towns of Punjab, including Chandigarh – bound by a code in which probity, courtesy, and personal honour were not slogans, but quietly observed virtues.Most such individuals were also not deracinated, retaining strong ties to their respective Punjabi pinds or villages, equally at ease navigating urban drawing rooms and rural courtyards. Their cultural grounding – unlike much of today’s more globally homogenised elite – was steadier and more rooted, anchored in land, lineage, language, and community memory. This, in turn, provided them both a social and moral centre of gravity, one that stemmed from continuity rather than from 21st century social media and its endless ritual of prompting ‘likes’ and manufactured attention, where approval is granted instantly and forgotten just as quickly.One such gentleman, as at ease in English ways as in his native roots, illustrated this perfectly at a dinner party in Chandigarh.When asked whether he considered himself more Punjabi or more British, he paused, sipped his whisky, and said, “Punjabi enough to enjoy excess. English enough to pretend I don’t.” The line neatly captured the type: culturally rooted but socially Anglicised, comfortable with indulgence yet trained to disguise it, traditional in instinct but urbane in conduct – a clear bridge between Punjabi exuberance and English restraint.Members of this class were shaped by English-modelled public or boarding schools and other educational institutions run by foreign missionary teaching orders like the Irish Brothers or various Jesuit orders. That formulation was further reinforced by cantonment cultures, civil service households, regimental messes, and social clubs – and, for some, by Oxbridge or the Inns of Court, or both.A large proportion of those who pursued such higher study abroad, unlike today, invariably returned home to take up employment locally, whether in the civil services, education, journalism, or the handful of multinational companies still operating out of India at the time. They were all drawn back by a sense of purpose, opportunity, and hope in a newly independent nation, when it was still considered possible to contribute to institution-building, shape governance, and participate in the creation of a fair and just society still in the making.Conversation, in their world – and it remains so for the few survivors – was measured; reserve and decency were the default, and obligations remembered and honoured. Their Punjabi identity, however, was unmistakable, yet their Englishness was neither performative nor a rejection of home or culture.Instead, it was absorbed through institutional schooling and professional guilds, accompanied by a fondness for mess silver, regimental plate, club blazers and ties, proper table settings, and the understated rituals of the officers’ mess and civil lines; and, on a lighter note of a shared lifelong loyalty to Scotch in the evening and gin-and-tonic gimlets by day.There is no gainsaying that these were the offspring of means and privilege – midnight’s children, coming of age in the twilight of colonial influence, which lingered well beyond 1947. To borrow a generational label, they can also be viewed as the Subcontinent’s ‘baby boomers’: a generation whose formative years were shaped by institutions, codes, and aspirations unmistakably English in tone and social style – what detractors today dub New Delhi’s “Khan Market set” or the Lutyens elite.Yet their outward Englishness sat lightly upon them, more an acquired finish than a conversion. It was a kind of layering – applied neatly like polish rather than multiple coats of paint. Their manners and demeanour were, doubtlessly, partly imported – pleasing, increasingly rare today, and nostalgically sought after presently by many – but their instincts, understanding, and outlook remained firmly local.They spoke Punjabi, including its colourful abuses, as fluently as they expressed English restraint in speech, quoting Tennyson, Byron, and Coleridge with as much felicity as they did the verses of Farid, Bulleh Shah and near contemporary Waris Shah. They heartily ate mooli (radish) and methi (fenugreek) parathas for breakfast and Rajmah for lunch, and solid English fare like roast mutton with mint sauce or shepherd’s pie, for dinner.Even their anger was tempered by old-world civility – shouting was gauche, sarcasm sharper; volume was considered vulgar, and precision preferred, as the cut it delivered was invariably neat, and usually fatal. Clothing too was central to their persona, making them easily identifiable in public: mostly tweed jackets in winter, preferably with elbow leather patches, polished brogues, flannel slacks, double-cuff shirts, silk ties, and casually mismatched breast-pocket kerchiefs. For them, dressing well was not vanity – it was duty.One apocryphal story from the 1960s illustrates this perfectly.During a club dinner, one such gentleman encountered a newly wealthy businessman wearing a perfectly matching tie and pocket square: same fabric, same pattern, aggressively coordinated. He stared at him for a long moment, then leaned over, looking pointedly at the pocket kerchief and murmured, “Very nice. Did it come free with the tie?” The remark, delivered softly and without malice, was devastating in its effect. By dessert, the pocket square had vanished from the business man’s pocket.In less socially restrained times – when cruelty often passed for wit – such men were tagged with labels that, in today’s milieu of political correctness, would be deemed offensive- Brown saheb’s, coconuts and, more caustically, WOGs – variously expanded as Western-oriented gentlemen or, more sharply, Wily Oriented Gentlemen.Brown saheb and coconut implied mimicry of colonial masters – brown on the outside, white within – while the latter term carried the full racial condescension of empire and its lingering prejudices. Such epithets were deployed by critics who viewed these English-polished manners and cultivated preferences not as refinement but as slavish affectation – even cultural betrayal.Their taste in dress, food, and speech was likewise mocked as pretentious; their quiet civility and measured speech were mistaken for weakness or snobbery. Even small gestures – a carefully adjusted cufflink, a softly sipped whisky, a politely corrected mispronunciation – could be twisted into evidence of ostentation, prompting sardonic laughter from those who felt no need for refinement or style in themselves.This social type did not arise in a vacuumIt germinated most visibly before Partition in undivided Punjab, where colonial rule reshaped the province through a strategic blend of state patronage and infrastructure and agrarian engineering. After annexing Punjab in 1849, following the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the British treated it as both a frontier and a test-bed for imperial governance.Soon after, the loyalty and battlefield effectiveness of Sikh and Punjabi Muslim troops during the 1857 uprising further secured the province’s favour. In the decades that followed, Punjab received special attention, including a vast canal network – much of it supplemented and still active today – sustained military recruitment, structured land grants, and carefully calibrated administrative and social patronage. In effect, the province became the empire’s military backbone, providing the bulk of its fighting force in both World Wars.Fundamentally, the inherently robust Punjabi identity – with its irreverent humour, hearty boisterousness, and unrestrained emotions – appealed to the English, fostering a symbiosis of mutual patronage: the British relied on Punjabi soldiers, administrators, and landlords to maintain order and extend imperial influence; in turn, privileged Punjabis gained prestige, official and soldierly positions, and economic advantage, along with exposure to British social conventions and codes of conduct.The military–agrarian compact further spawned a distinctive social by-product among sections of the Punjabi elite and officer class. Prolonged army service, regimental culture, and close administrative contact fostered Anglicised tastes with indulgences like keeping pet dogs, playing polo, field sports, orderly domestic routines, club life, and punctilious table manners. Over time, especially among landed and service families, this produced a recognisable type: culturally rooted in Punjab but outwardly guided by English norms.The highly secretive Freemason Society too played a role among segments of the Punjabi upper classes, adding another discreet layer to the Anglo-institutional social world they inhabited. Introduced under British rule, Masonic lodges in cities such as Lahore, Rawalpindi and Amritsar operated as invitation-only fraternities for senior soldiers, civil servants, judges, lawyers, and landed notables.Part of their attraction lay in structured secrecy and exclusivity: closed-door meetings, elaborate symbolic rituals, coded modes of recognition, graded initiations, and strict obligations of confidentiality. For Punjabi elites already shaped by cantonment life and administrative hierarchy, this culture of oath-bound fellowship and guarded speech felt prestigious. Membership signalled entry into a private, rule-governed circle where discretion was prized and trust formalised.Correspondingly, there was also a dramatic rise in agricultural output and rural wealth, market towns emerged and Punjab became one of the subcontinent’s principal grain baskets. Alongside came the railways, courts and district offices, followed by government and mission-run schools, the Rotary Club, colleges in united Punjab’s capital Lahore, and enhanced pathways into the army and civil services opened up exponentially for locals as the Empire sensed its demise.Furthermore, titles, jagirs and honorary ranks added a layer of social reward, and the cumulative effect was the growth of a locally rooted but empire-aligned Punjabi elite, whose outlook and manners increasingly mirrored those of their colonial patrons.Partition, however, violently severed Punjab, but it also preserved certain habits among the Punjabi elites who survived and prospered. Many upper-class families clung to the manners and disciplines they already knew as anchors in chaos in the turbulent years after independence; Englishness became their stabilising grammar amid dislocation and over decades till well into the 1970s what had begun as loose structure, hardened into identity.That’s why, as the last of these personages fade, it feels less like social change and more like the extinction of a species – one that could be both deeply Punjabi and quietly English without ever feeling the need to explain either.