Babu

Babu is originally a respectful Bengali term of address — roughly "sir" or "mister", and a tender form of address for fathers and elders. Under the British Raj it shifted into colonial English with a sneer, meaning a low-level Indian clerk in the colonial bureaucracy ("babu English" was a stereotyped style of overformal Indianised prose). In modern Indian English it still names the broad bureaucratic class, often critically — as in "babudom".