Club-culture snobbery

Being a late entrant to the club culture, thanks to my parent's leftist leanings, I still look upon its extreme idiosyncrasies and silliness with wonder.

Therefore, the recent furore following the refusal of entry to the Madras High Court Justice, D Hariparanthaman, by the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association Club for wearing a dhoti has not surprised me.

Clubs have their rules. And no matter how spurious and offensive they are, members have to abide by them until they can get them changed.

Club-culture snobbery is a particularly urban Indian phenomenon. The British colonialists founded islands of peace and refuge where they could recreate their lifestyles from back home: billiards and bridge, waiters who bent low and said 'Ji hai' when serving the Camparis, and cricket on the lawns. Club culture was 'a thing of beauty and a joy forever' for our imperialist rulers.

I only truly understood club culture when I moved to Kolkata from Mumbai in the early 1980s. Now married and removed from my parent's Marxist beliefs, I saw the Tollygunge Club, where we applied for membership, as a whole new experience.

A kind employer had advised us that it would be the ideal way to make friends and understand the new city to which we had moved.

I had approached the process of being vetted and receiving membership with bemused enthusiasm. The 'Tolly Club', I quickly realised, was a reflection of Mumbai's Gymkhana Club or 'Bombay Gym' as it was known. A haven for box-wallahs - men and women who worked for leading multinationals, who were interested in golf and riding, and singing rugby songs together over Bloody Marys and pepper steaks.

It was Kolkata's snooty Bengal Club that mirrored Mumbai's bastion of snootiness - the Willingdon. Here, members were more likely to be owners of companies and pillars of society: leading industrialists, top bankers and the progeny of the rich and powerful.

In the pecking order of both cities, the Willingdon and its counterpart, the Bengal Club, were the blue chip hangouts. Delhi's club culture somehow never quite matched up to the Mumbai-Kolkata one.

All I recall of the few visits to the Delhi Gymkhana was a vast and wet pool area crammed with very loud Punjabi families ordering samosas doused in industrial-sized quantities of tamatar sass. And in the evenings there was always a drunken skirmish to look forward to where the words "Don't you know who I am?" would be heard.

Clubs are an incubator of minor snobberies and epic silliness. That people can judge whether you're 'the right sort of person' to allow membership to over tea and soggy sandwiches is a bit of a joke and really quite offensive when you think about it. Coupled with that is the mediocre food and indifferent service and the possibility that one can be humiliated by some spurious by-law.

Yet, regardless of this, I spend more time than most people at my club in Mumbai. I do this because my club allows me what non-club establishments increasingly don't: a relatively secure, private haven where I can be myself in the company of like-minded individuals and pay for cheaper food and drink.

More or less the same reasons that the Brits had for creating these clubs in the first place. And if an offensive rule about dress code or behaviour militates against national pride and human rights, I too accept it as something that comes along with the territory.

Club culture - could anything be more irrelevant and specious in the new and changing India?

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com