Abstract
The character Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur, from Frank Richards’s schoolboy fiction is considered in the broader context of Richards’s construction of the ethnic Other and found to be relatively inoffensive. Salman Rushdie’s criticism of the Nabob character is shown to owe more to misinterpretations such as George Orwell’s in “Boys’ Weeklies” than to the original character. The Nabob icon is found to be composed of three attributes: his intelligence, his idiosyncratic English and his cricketing prowess. In imagological terms, the counter-image (Indian) is too close to the self-image (English) for it to be offensive. What is more, Rushdie’s attempts to kill off the icon in The Moor’s Last Sighwere bound to fail as the very attributes of the allegedly offensive Nabob have become part of the Indian’s own self image, a self-image Rushdie’s own novel celebrates.
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