The following article is about the origins of Club life in British India. The author has extensively researched the subject, and in addition writes on some of his own experiences in the better known and popular Clubs of modern India.
“ In any town In India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain” George Orwell in Burmese Days 1935.
A lot of fun has been poked at Club life in India, without those who indulged in this sort of sport realizing how vital a part of the life it was. Getting together for games and exercise and talk was an important part of life in British India. It was the social center of the civilian and military station. A place to meet was the eventual epitome of all social life, something that seems to have effectively been passed down to Independent India of the 21st century. Club life in the Country today can easily be typecast into very distinctive divisions. There are purely ‘military’ clubs where ‘civilian ‘ membership would be ‘passe’; little do most know, that it was essentially this very reason to have civil-military interaction, that Clubs in the first place came into existence. The Club represented the ‘hub of local society’, principally of senior officials. To quote in the words of Kenneth Warren who was the son of the founder of the Tea Industry in India, ‘There would be the Collector, the Sub Collector, the Sessions Judge, the District Forest Officer, the District Superintendent of Police, the Excise Assistant Commissioner and several other officials from the public works department and so on’ who were members of the Club as an institution of pre War British India of the 1930’s. Not surprisingly there were only a limited number of places at which there were any Europeans who were not officials. At such places army officers swelled the list of members and the Club provided a meeting place between the Civil and the Military.
Many of the upcountry clubs had their origins in sporting institutions. When Kenneth Warren first went to Assam all the clubs were polo clubs and it was only in later times that these clubs became more social clubs. This mixing of sport and social activities was a feature in all but the largest stations. ‘ You had to belong to the club before you could play any games’ says John Morris a one time District Collector in his memoirs. Those who could join were not expected to do otherwise. It was considered obligatory to belong, even if one never went and attended the club functions. After all we must understand the ethos of the times. In British India of the 1930s, the Country was ruled by them and being from the ‘mother country’ with little else to do there was great need for interaction. The British also believed a great deal in sport as a means of character building and exercise. This aspect is something we in modern India still are not quite clear in our minds about. Philip Mason an ex Collector writes, ‘ I regard it as a duty to go to the Club at least every night,’ he used to say. He was a very light drinker and always used to drink what was called a pau-peg of whiskey when he got there.
Some men by virtue of their occupations made bad ‘club men’. Arthur Hamilton a forest officer in 1940, wrote, ‘ My life was so different from theirs.’ When a forest officer returned from a long tour, and came to a club he was looked down upon rather as a ‘jungle wallah’. ‘And of course he was a jungle – wallah.’ It was just his job. It was nevertheless considered unwise not to become a member of a club as people who were not members were considered as outcasts. There were some people who refused to become members of Clubs and these were mostly the intellectuals, who preferred to spend their evenings studying history or the Indian languages or the classics and who thought a Club was a waste of time. Either you were a rebel, and a rather courageous rebel, who didn’t belong to the Club, or else you were a social outcast who wanted to belong to the Club and couldn’t get in.
Club membership was dependent almost entirely upon occupation. This is the exact same case in modern India. There is the Lion’s Club where one invariably finds only the business class. Then there are the other clubs for the new moneyed classes. Then there are the nouveau riche who often form a club, since it’s the ‘done’ thing. The status of being in a Club is all they search for. But then it’s a meeting place and thus the original concept remains secure and carries on. In the times of the British, FC Hart who was ‘country bred’ and so prevented from joining the Indian Police at the same level as his public school contemporaries, was able to play hockey and cricket with them but could not join their clubs. Similarly, in a District dominated by cotton mills ‘all the office people - nearly all Europeans but some Indians -- were allowed to be members of the Club, but the technical people who mended the looms and even operated them, who were also Europeans and skilled workmen and even drawing higher pay than most of the white collared workers, were on no account permitted to be members of the Club. Clubs had committees that decided who would and ho would not become a member. Potential members were vetted and the process was as lengthy as it is in the Clubs of modern India. Clubs were ‘very carefully ruled’ as Kenneth Mason another District officer writes. Army officers were not eligible for the Bengal Club, which was mainly commercial, nor could a man who was in commerce eligible to join the United Service Club. One was in commerce and eligible for the Bengal Club, but the other was not, being in trade and a distributor of wines. So he joined the Royal Bengal Horse Cavalry, became an Army man and thus joined the United Service Club. Calcutta was the place where anyone who mattered lived during the Raj, and it was only later that Delhi on becoming the capital of India changed things for the Clubbers of modern India. However the true blue blood member of a Club was invariably someone who was from the great city of Calcutta. One had the Saturday Club where young men joined up as it was a social club for dancing and squash and swimming and a generally active social life. Then there was the Tollygunge Club on the then outskirts of Calcutta a very select club with a then waiting list of six years, that had a golf course, a racecourse and a swimming pool. Many people used to ride into the countryside and come back to have breakfast in the Club. Then a young man got senior enough he could join the Bengal Club, which was famous for its cuisine and was quite a landmark in those heady days of the British Raj.
The subject of Indians as members or even the permission to let them join was what ‘almost split the Empire’. L t Gen Sir Reginald Savory, Adjutant General of India and who left in 1946-47, maintains that ‘one of the greatest mistakes we ever made was to frown upon Indian becoming members of the Club. Certain Clubs did not permit Indians to become members. When one considers that it was not every Englishman who came to India who came from the upper classes, and that there were in India some of the most highly bred and cultivated educated men in the world, to keep them out and allow Englishmen in, was utter nonsense’.
Lt Col Sukhwant Singh
Sep 1999
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