The bubble has burst and nothing will quite set Humpty right again. No committee, court order, heritage note or emotional WhatsApp forward by a wailing cop can quite put it back together. A full-scale attack on clubs is now underway, leaving everyone perplexed about the intent. The touch-me-not charm that clubbers inhabiting these manicured islands of privilege had, is destroyed in a way that can’t quite be described by those who haven’t felt their bliss.
The roughshod entry of regulatory rulers into these hallowed portals has once again raised the question of what this brouhaha means. And club members will forever feel that horror every time they hear the bells toll.
Let’s draw out the three blimps that float around in this debate. First, there are the trustees, committee members, members and their dependents, and those close to the finish line on that forever-waiting list. Then there are the outstation users and frequent guests. Employees, somehow a special worker-class (often hereditary), fall into this second category. In the third circle of the Venn diagram is the larger mass of city dwellers whose aspiration is just to be a powerful auntie in one’s resident welfare association, or be part of a colonial club that doesn’t entitle one to any fields of fancy, bars of belonging, or floridity of ritual beyond paying the measly dues.
Outside these three circles—‘Ah, Dante!’ a club classicist would exclaim—exists the rest of the world, which is busy with bhajan-based raves for the young and all-night jagratas or prayer circles for the elderly as preferred group kinks. This much larger world—and some would say, the real world—very often doesn’t even realise it’s living cheek-by-jowl with clubs whose walls they have never attempted to scale.
What has been shattered is the sense of colonial continuity that some clubs attempted to replicate in the little nuances they insisted were membership rituals. They used the power vested by perpetual leases to inflict behavioural regulations on those who wished to pass through their portals, escape being blackballed, and had the accountable resources to pay the fees that have become astronomical in recent years. To facetiously comprehend how exclusive these clubs are, one can consider the rumour that their ‘strict’ vetting process simply involves keeping out anyone who has to ask the price of a gin-and-tonic, which is heavily subsidised anyway.
In some cases, the entry regulation was made simply a matter of waiting until the death of an existing member. In others, it was genetically proscribed for some and inscribed for those lucky enough to have some controlling authority able to subpoena a hidden quota. In a few places, there was the fig leaf of producing national-level sportspersons because they had been privileged to be young participants in games they couldn’t otherwise afford to attempt.
This illusion of exclusivity has lasted much longer than these 70 years. There are seriously important elements of those practices and privileges that are part of almost all democratic countries that have been colonised in the past. The English led by a league, but the Portuguese and French colonisers didn’t quite abandon this process. Clubs were created or retained in places they had conquered.
At all points, however, exclusivity was the theme. Civility was the veneer that was put on as an overlay. Ensuring that the natives were kept in place and allowing in those who were willing and powerful collaborators—as long as they mimicked and brown-nosed their cruel rulers—was the real game. That carries on to this day. (Remember those quotas?)
Today, that same game is made out as an issue of nostalgia, of nationally-vital networking, and sometimes of nepotism disguised by some other convenient name. In the case of some clubs, the membership was automatic for administrators and uniformed star bearers, who otherwise were fleeting birds of passage in most places, but felt the need to be attached to one of these clubs in the place they intended to retire. Now, if shutdowns spread, those very worthies will have to be satisfied with their gilded service officers’ institutes, even if they lack the social cachet that the ‘real’ clubs used to give them.
The less said about the food culture of these clubs, the better. One may make an exception for the fact that Eggs Kejriwal was invented at Mumbai’s Willingdon Club, or that the Thursday night ritual at the Delhi Gymkhana had the stiffest drinks in town at the lowest rates, or that the cheeseballs were what childhood memories were made of. Elsewhere, caramel custards, mutton cutlets and cream rolls acquired sacred emotional value simply because they tasted the same every summer vacation. There are few rituals of either the food or the beverage variety that have made any impact on the world outside of the clubs. Thankfully.
This is now visible only notionally about unauthorised land occupiers. What, then, could explain this visible tension and invisible deadline? Is this a message, like a harpoon shot across the prow of a ship that’s due to be sunk? Is this the beginning of a new class war? Are the elites being reduced to rubble by the bulldozer-wallas?
The clubs may well survive. Some of them, anyway. Because India is not giving up on hierarchy yet. There will always be a market for exclusivity, old-money manners and places where the waiting list is part of the attraction. But the aura has surely been enfeebled.
Dilip Cherian | Image guru and litigation landscaper
(Views are personal)
(On X @dilipthecherian)
