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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,........

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