There is something comforting about institutions that seem immune to time. As people, we are hopelessly attached to nostalgia, to the illusion that places can hold memory still for us, neatly arranged like old photographs in an album we return to when the present feels uncertain. And nowhere does nostalgia sit quite so comfortably as it does inside Delhi Gymkhana Club. You arrive and the city slows down. Somewhere between lunch service and evening drinks, time feels suspended.
For many Delhiites, or at least those fortunate enough to enter these spaces, Gymkhana is less a club and more an emotional archive, where memory often arrives through food and drinks. Few tables escape the familiar procession of mutton cutlets, chicken club sandwiches, chicken à la Kiev, fish fingers and caramel custard. These dishes are not extraordinary because they innovate. They endure because they are reassuring. Their appeal lies in continuity, in tasting almost exactly as memory expects them to.
Which is why the upheaval surrounding Delhi Gymkhana being asked to vacate its 27.3 acres in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi has stirred such emotion. Founded in 1913 as the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club, it grew alongside New Delhi after the British shifted India’s capital from Kolkata, first operating out of Civil Lines before moving to Safdarjung Road in 1928. Its present clubhouse was designed in the 1930s by British architect Robert Tor Russell, who also designed Connaught Place.
But nostalgia without context risks romanticism.
The Gymkhana was not built for India. It was built for the empire, designed as an exclusive social refuge for British colonists. Independent India inherited the institution and, over time, also inherited many of its hierarchies.
This is where the discomfort lies. Clubs such as these often speak of preserving culture and history, while also embodying privilege and exclusion. Memberships remain inaccessible, codes of belonging are unspoken but deeply understood. It is unsurprising that many have reacted to its possible closure with satisfaction, viewing it as the fall of an elite institution long removed from ordinary life, while those who grew up around it mourn something deeply personal.
“It’s like being evicted from home. I grew up in Gymkhana, my dad became a member in 1984. My parents used to take us swimming there and now I take my kids there. It’s an important part of our life.” says Smita Tripathi, a journalist and resident of Bharti Nagar in Central Delhi.
Her words also complicate an easy narrative. Institutions such as Gymkhana may carry the residue of privilege, but for many members they have also become spaces of continuity, routine and belonging. Yet neither reaction feels entirely sufficient.
Privilege deserves criticism, but elitism alone is not criminal, nor does it erase the emotional meaning places accumulate over decades. It is possible to interrogate what Gymkhana represents while still understanding why its uncertainty feels painful.
“Cities are layered entities. Different generations leave their mark on them,” historian Narayani Gupta once observed.
Delhi Gymkhana, for all its contradictions, became one such layer. It witnessed officers sharing farewell drinks in 1947 before Partition redrew loyalties, families marking milestones over familiar meals and generations building rituals around a place that felt permanent.
And perhaps the deepest sadness here is not even for members.
It is for the people whose lives quietly sustained the institution. The waiters who remembered orders without asking, kitchen staff who perfected cutlets and gravies over decades, gardeners who watched seasons shift across the lawns and attendants whose labour made nostalgia possible for others. Institutions such as these survive not on architecture or legacy alone, but on invisible routines performed by people who rarely enter the story.
To imagine them living with uncertainty feels more heartbreaking than the loss of a dining room or membership privilege.
Perhaps that is the paradox of places like Delhi Gymkhana. They can be exclusionary and deeply meaningful at once. Their histories deserve scrutiny, but their disappearance, if it comes to that, would still leave Delhi poorer in ways difficult to fully explain.
