I’ve been re-reading various short stories by Agatha Christie (The Labors of Hercules, The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories, etc.) and have a question:
She often has one character describing another as “pukka sahib,” in a way that’s a bit derisive. Usually the character doing the describing is some Fast Young Modern Thing, probably fresh off the tennis courts with her bobbed hair and her short skirts, and the character being described is a disapproving old biddy.
Obviously the expression implies a Anglo-Indian background – the wife of Colonel Mustard who spent the last days of Empire in the British Colony in Calcutta. But beyoned that, what it is supposed to convey? What did it mean, in the '20s in Britian, to be described as “pukka sahib”? And what does it literally mean, anyhow?
I enjoy reading some of AC’s work, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One of the most jarring things that struck me was the way both authors used the phrase “making love” to mean romancing or wooing. I had to go back and reread a few times for context when I first encountered the phrase thus used.
And, of course, Watson was always ejaculating all over the place, which I’m sure made for a jolly old time.
Actually, no less an authority than Poirot himself “defines” it in Murder on the Orient Express. Colonel Arbuthnot refers to Mary Debenham as a “pukka sahib.” After he’s left the compartment, somebody asks “What does that mean?”
Rolling his eyes, Poirot says, “It means her father went to the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot.”
In fact, it seems to be a basically respectful term, almost always used for another English person (so as to distinguish them from those ruddy foreigners). There’s surely a bit of class consciousness as well, based on Poirot’s reaction. Poirot, you’ll remember, was one of those ruddy foreigners.
I would guess, then, that the Fast Young Things in the stories you’re reading (which I haven’t read) are using the term ironically, to suggest that the Disapproving Old Biddy is the sort of stuck-up, class-conscious person one might find lording it over the natives in India and keeping track of what school her acquaintances went to.
As I say, that’s a guess (and quite similar to the conclusion you’d already come to yourself, now that I think about it), but it seems reasonable.
George Orwell, real name Eric Arthur Blair who was a policeman in Burma (Myanmar) described the "pukka sahibs’ code as “a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.” Book is Burmese Days
“Making love” was generally used this way at the time, and even later.
In the movie Rebecca (1939), when Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) proposes matter-of-factly to the heroine, he acknowledges apologetically that she would probably like a more romantic setting: “I should be making violent love to you behind a palm tree.”
I wonder when the meaning changed to “having sex”?