The Sahib in India, during the heyday of the East India Company, behaved, when it did not concern his financial status directly, in an affable manner, often intermarrying and adopting the local inhabitants' art of living. The growth of the company's dominions and later the involvement of the Crown's servants in Indian affairs changed the friendly relation between the Sahib and the Indian to one of cautiousness. In The Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling points out that the Sahib sought a self-contained English life in India. The reason for this retreat is the Sahib's inability to leave a permanent mark on the country he has decided to rule. Thus, the Club and the Hill Station become the sanctuary of the Empire. It represents symbolically the Anglo-Indian novelist's acceptance of the recessional period of British imperialism in India. In A Passage to India, the English community at the ghetto of Chandrapore express in their attitude a form of petrifaction in their relations to Indians, which Forster maintains, in Abinger Harvest, to be the product of an undeveloped heart. Bond's desire to de-ghettoize himself is a critique of the imperial practice and a symbol of the developmental process of the heart, negotiating with anxieties of identity.

Notions of alterity in the post-1857 imperial period in India underwent a review as the British government became excessively disposed to mapping their overseas dominion in terms of their domestic features. The consequence of which was the birth of an Anglicized Indian elite who were chosen for passing over the responsibility of governance of the country after it was made independent.