In the club: Associational life in colonial South Asia

By Benjamin B Cohen

In the club presents a comprehensive examination of social clubs across South Asia, arguing for clubs as key contributors to South Asia’s colonial associational life and civil society. Using government records, personal memoirs, private club records, and club histories themselves, In the club explores colonial club life with chapters arranged thematically: the legal underpinnings of clubs; their physical locations and compositions; their financial health; the role of servants and staff as employees of clubs; issues of race and class in clubs; women’s clubs; and finally clubs in their postcolonial milieus. This book will be critical reading for scholars of South Asia, graduate students, and intellectually engaged club members alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780719098109

Benjamin B Cohen

Benjamin B. Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah

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Introduction

On St. Valentine’s Day, 1867, Sir Bartle Frere addressed members of Bombay’s Byculla Club (1833) during a banquet held in his honor. In that year, Frere (1815–84) was concluding his term as governor of Bombay. A graduate of Haileybury, the British school designed to train outbound Indian Civil Service officers, Frere began his long career in India as a writer. He spoke Hindustani, Gujarati, and Marathi – all of which served him well as he advanced, holding positions as resident, member of the viceroy’s Executive Council, and then governor. As the members finished dessert and topped up their wine glasses, the club’s president, Andrew Richard Scoble, introduced Frere.¹ In the course of his remarks, Frere commented on the value of the Byculla Club and clubs in general, arguing that ‘in England we are in the habit of doing very scant justice to institutions like the one within whose walls we are assembled. We have got into a habit of talking of them as excrescences on our social organization, but I have frequently thought they take a very important part in preparing Englishmen for that political life which is more or less the lot of every one of us.’ In Frere’s view, clubs had been little recognized for their value as serious social organizations. He continued by noting the values and skills that club participation imparted to its members:

We are trained in our clubs to habitual respect for the verdict of the majority. When a question has once been fairly discussed and voted on and decided, there is, for the time at least, an end of it in every well ordered club, and this alone is a habit of no small value in political life. Then again, in every club there is habited respect for the authority of the ruling body chosen by the members themselves as the most fit to govern them. But above all, we are trained in our clubs to have a habitual and liberal regard for the wishes and feelings of the minority, and I cannot help feeling that it is a great deal owing to the feeling thus inculcated and to the habits of mind fostered by this feature of our club management in England that we owe some of that feeling to which the Chairman alluded when he spoke of the way in which we habitually treat the natives of this country.²

Clubs, he argued, inculcated in their members an understanding of the democratic system, the justice of rule by the majority while still respecting the rights of the minority. Clubs also taught respect for the ruling authority. In other words, Frere contended that clubs were valuable associations for teaching social and civil practices central to democratic life. Of course, as a white British colonial officer, Frere’s defense was a safe position for him to take; he was the epitome of someone who was entirely clubbable.

Sixty-five years later in 1932, at the height of India’s nationalist movement, a less likely proponent made a strikingly similar argument in favor of clubs and their utility. This time it came from feminist and nationalist K. Radhabai Subbarayan (1891–1960). Subbarayan was a founding member of the Nilgiri Ladies’ Club (1930), a member of the Women’s India Association (WIA), and the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC). In addition, the government of India had appointed her to the Second Round Table Conference in 1930–31 in London along with Begam Shah Nawaz to represent India’s women. Subbarayan was relatively well traveled, having met suffragists in England and having attended Somerville College, Oxford.³ She, like Frere, made a similar case for clubs:

I do not think it is exaggeration to say that our Club, to some extent at least, provides its members with the training and experience necessary for performing public duties. The various activities of our Club also help its members to cultivate broad vision, tolerance, patience, good-will, and respect for opinions of others, and above all the team spirit – qualities which make good citizens and are a great asset in public life.⁴

Subbarayan argued that clubs were part of public life and prepared members for performing public and political duties. That a British colonial official and an Indian feminist nationalist both viewed the club as an important social institution suggests that social clubs should not be viewed as ‘excrescences,’ but rather as building blocks of India’s associational life and civil society. Subbarayan and Frere understood that clubs, like churches, societies, political parties, and a range of associational forms, equip their members at the personal level with valuable skills, and contribute to civil society and the making of democracy.

The types of clubs that Subbarayan and Frere spoke about are often perceived as being bastions of white privilege, discriminating on the basis of race, class, and gender. However, this categorization paints clubs with a coarse brush that misses the more complex nature of these associations. The supposedly impenetrable walls of the clubs as bastions of colonial ‘exceptionalism’ and white privilege were porous to different degrees.⁵ Indian and British clubs with race-based admission rules boldly violated them when local realities required it; women’s clubs admitted men and men’s clubs admitted women; and poorer citizens of the British Raj, when shut out of class-based clubs, made use of India’s relatively open public sphere and opened clubs of their own. ‘The club’ was thus a much more complex institution than it might seem and is long overdue for a reappraisal.

Club types and networks

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a variety of associational forms emerged across South Asia. Of these, clubs were just one type, and when taken as a whole, they formed a supranetwork of associational life. A club may be broadly defined as an association of individuals sharing some common interests and goals. Its members are admitted by ballot and in this way clubs are different from voluntary associations, where membership is less controlled. In South Asia, the majority of clubs have been social or sporting in nature. They opened in different settings: large urban clubs in colonial centers; hill station clubs; clubs in princely states; and clubs in dusty countryside towns. They often had a dining room, library, reading room, bar, lounge, and a billiards room; some also had rooms for overnight guests and sports facilities. Three of the earliest and largest social clubs were the Bengal Club (1827) in Calcutta, the Madras Club (1832), and the Byculla Club (1833) in Bombay. Social clubs in large urban areas constituted the majority of club types in India and so feature heavily in this work. While Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay had large populations that supported several clubs, other clubs in smaller rural outposts sometimes struggled to survive. The Gulbarga Club, located west of the Deccan’s Hyderabad, came in for a scathing attack in the Deccan Budget. Being in a small town, the club faced challenges keeping its membership active. The newspaper charged it with ‘dragging on an existence, which is enough to bring disgrace and discredit even on the unlettered and uncivilized inhabitants of far off Timbuctoo.’ As it hovered ‘between life and death’ – a problem urban clubs rarely faced – its members were chided to begin ‘shaking off their phenomenal lethargy’ and ‘do the needful.’⁶ In other words, the club served an important social function in Gulbarga and the newspaper expected its members to participate more actively in the club and bring it back to life.⁷

Sporting clubs were also numerous in South Asia. These were frequently referred to by the term gymkhana, which derives from the Hindi gend-khana (literally ‘ball house,’ referring to European racket courts). While having a sporting focus, these often provided the amenities of a social club as well. Many cities and towns hosted both a social club and gymkhana club. In Bombay, the Byculla Club served as the dominant British social club, but the city also boasted the Bombay Gymkhana Club.⁸ While most clubs had physical homes, some were itinerant. The pig-sticking clubs that formed in Agra, Delhi, Calcutta, Meerut, and elsewhere met in the field during the hunting season to pursue India’s wild boar, while a few maintained spartan offices for storage purposes.⁹

Over time, more specialized clubs arose. At Simla, individuals who did not return to Delhi in winter (the off-season) provided a reason to organize the Simla Winter Amusement Club, which maintained an ice rink and organized tobogganing and indoor badminton for its members. With few members and a limited program, the club operated out of the town hall rather than owning a permanent office.¹⁰ Yacht clubs were popular in Bombay, and with the arrival of the airplane in India, flying clubs were started in Punjab and elsewhere.¹¹ Britons were fond of entertainment, and drama clubs often operated as adjuncts of larger clubs. In some locations, drama clubs were freestanding, such as India’s oldest, Simla’s Amateur Dramatic Club, dating from 1837.

Some transnational organizations had branches or clubs in South Asia: the Freemasons (c. 1390), the Rotary (1905), the Lions Clubs International (1917), as well as the YMCA (1844) and YWCA (1855).¹² Seringapatnam in south India was also home to a branch of the Jacobin Club that was in operation from the late eighteenth century.¹³ Like the clubs examined in this work, these types of organizations had physical homes, offered amenities for members, and made their own contributions both to the members who participated in their activities and to the community beyond. They must be included in the long list of associational forms that have thrived in South Asia, yet they are not examined in what follows. These organizations have their institutional origin and epicenters outside of South Asia. Like a restaurant franchise, individuals chose to open a local branch of one of these organizations in an Indian locale. Thus, they were bound to a larger central authority for some of their structure and purpose. In contrast, the clubs I examine participated in a variety of networks, yet they were not part of a larger organizational franchise. Exceptions to this are the United Service Clubs. The United Service Clubs shared a name rather than a firm institutional structure.¹⁴ Their members came from the East India Company and the British military services. United Service Clubs across South Asia partnered with those in Britain. A young officer might take a membership in the Junior United Service Club of London, which specifically targeted personnel heading to India.¹⁵ He would then be welcomed at a United Service Club in India.¹⁶ As the United Service Clubs derived from a connection to the East India Company, I include them here. Thus, from the late eighteenth century, a wide variety of different types of clubs opened across the subcontinent. As clubs catered to more and more specialized audiences, this process often prompted new ones to open to counteract such limitations on membership. In this way, clubs of all sorts contributed to India’s associational life.

Associational life also included political organizations; for instance, the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay presidencies each had their own associations to raise concerns regarding issues particular to their region, and from those – borrowing certain structural elements from clubs – arose the Indian National Congress (INC). Within modern South Asian history, the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 is considered a crucial moment. While the INC is usually studied as a political party, it arose within a broader associational milieu. The British Indian Association, the Bombay Association, the East India Association, the Madras Native Association, the Madras Mahajana Sabha, and countless clubs and other associational forms all provided the associational soil from which the INC grew. In fact, the Congress began as a type of club.¹⁷ The Congress party’s club-like origins can be seen in its circular issued in March 1885. Just as clubs had done for fifty years before it, the Congress circular lists the attendees, the object of the conference, and the anticipated outcome or benefit. The INC’s listing of members, statement of purpose, and the other associational spadework was undoubtedly influenced by the legal framework under which most clubs also fit, such as those of the Indian Companies Act and the Societies Act. The Congress’s objectives included allowing attendees to become ‘personally known to each other’ and ‘the promotion of personal intimacy and friendship’ among members.¹⁸ As we will see, sociability was an important part of club life and purpose.¹⁹ Further, the Congress aimed at ‘the eradication, by direct friendly personal intercourse, of all possible race, creed, or provincial prejudices amongst all lovers of our country, and the fuller development and consolidation of those sentiments of national unity that had their origin in their beloved Lord Ripon’s ever memorable reign.’²⁰ Several Congress members were themselves club members; for instance, Subramania Iyer of Madras was a member of Madras’ Cosmopolitan Club (1873); also in attendance speaking on legislative reforms was Sir Henry Cotton, a member of the Bengal Club.²¹ As we will see, the triumvirate of attendees, objectives, and outcomes from the Congress’s circular of 1885 shares much in common with club practice, as well as fitting a larger pattern of associational life.

Clubs participated in a series of networks that not only linked them to each other, but also embedded them in their localities and more broadly within a form of colonial civil society. A network is a series of related nodes that are linked to one another in some way. Different networks intersected at a given club that can be categorized into three broad groups: social, ideological, and logistical. Clubs allowed individuals to associate with each other and thus form a community of people known to one another who created a social network. Sometimes this network was predetermined and relatively homogeneous: for instance, the Princess of Wales Club in Bhopal was almost entirely for Bhopal’s Muslim women population. At other times, this network introduced individuals to members of different communities, bridging across race, class, gender, or colonizer/colonized lines. Belonging to a club offered individuals an additional or alternative way to belong to a type of community.²² The club community was real in that members could meet each other face-to-face at the club, but it was also imagined: members could never meet face-to-face every member of every affiliated club.²³ To facilitate that imagining of belonging to a network of clubs, they provided members with lapel pins, neckties, rulebooks, playing cards, and other paraphernalia that carried with them the club name and crest, thus helping members to ‘feel’ a part of the club, even when they were away from its physical location. The social networks that clubs supported drew individuals together, providing them an outpost for sociability. As Neera Chandhoke describes such social networks, ‘The solitary individual may perchance find a home in and through these networks of belonging in an otherwise impersonal and anonymous social order.’²⁴

Clubs were also part of ideological networks. Clubs and their members maintained certain ideas about who they were and what they believed. At one level, the practices of a club tied it to a shared ideological network. Groups of individuals forming a club would usually copy the rules and bylaws of another club. Still another club would copy these, and so on. Soon, most clubs in South Asia formed a network with largely similar rules and bylaws; implicit in this was a shared belief in the rule of law. At another level, certain explicit practices fostered less appealing networks. Some British clubs did not admit Indians as full members, and when these clubs formed affiliations with each other, they created a network of limited membership.

Finally, clubs participated in networks that served their logistical needs. As a physical space, clubs were embedded in the land in which they were located. And as such, to meet basic needs, they participated in a variety of logistics networks: renting buildings; purchasing foodstuffs from local Indian suppliers; ordering supplies from Britain, France, Portugal, and the United States; employing dozens or even hundreds of local employees, and so on. Through their purchasing power, clubs accessed logistics networks and provided their members with certain amenities that made the club a desirable place to be.

Logistical reasons form some of the earliest justifications for creating a club. The United Service Club of London was established in 1815 for individuals who had served in India or other Asian climes. Lord Lynedoch (1748–1843) explained that officers who were in London for a short time were ‘precluded from belonging to the best established clubs, [and] were necessarily driven into expensive and bad taverns and coffeehouses, without a chance of meeting their friends, or any good society during their stay in town.’²⁵ Colonel Finch, first president of the Bengal Club, directly cites the United Service Club (and by extension its purpose) in the explanation he offers in that club’s prospectus: ‘if such associations have been found beneficial in London, where so many and such various resources offer themselves, they will be infinitely more serviceable in Calcutta, where nothing like a respectable hotel or coffee-house has ever existed.’²⁶ A few years later, the prospectus for the Madras Club laid out similar reasons for its creation.²⁷ These clubs were at the center of social networks for Britons in India, ideological networks for service members, and logistical networks that provided specific amenities – most importantly, offering an alternative to ‘bad taverns.’ These networks thus allowed clubs to link themselves and their members together, but also firmly establish themselves on Indian soil and within Indo-British colonial civil society.

The span of clubs

Clubs in India were colonial transplants and thus some brief prehistory of the club, before it reached Indian shores, is in order. European-style clubs were not the first forms of associational life in India; the subcontinent has its own long history of associational life that also warrants some short explication. Clubs or similar forms of association can be found dating to the time of the Romans. Associational life continued to grow and become refined into Europe’s middle ages with the rise of fraternities and gilds. By the early modern period, types of secular academies had opened in Italy, and it was from these that the French in the seventeenth century took inspiration. France witnessed an associational boom at this time, its own forms of associational life intermingling with those in other parts of Europe such as Germany and the Netherlands. Clubs in Britain, from which clubs in India traced their origins, began to appear in the early seventeenth century. Yet, as Peter Clark has argued, British clubs seem to have been less influenced by those in France or the continent, but rather were products of Britain’s own associational life forms such as its gilds and fraternities. By the mid-seventeenth century, coffee houses dotted London’s landscape and new types of coffee house clubs developed. These were demarcated by the lack of a strong or permanent bond between members, and the lack of a permanent club structure within which to meet. This would change throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century as the types of clubs became further refined. First, clubs that formerly met in other businesses’ premises (such as a coffee shop) now pooled their resources and rented or bought their own buildings. Second, a less structured type of club developed that did not have a permanent structure, but was rather based on occasional or periodic meetings for some special event. Seasonal hunting (which became pig sticking in its Indian form), reunions, special holidays, and more all might attract members to join such itinerant and occasional clubs. Both of these latter styles of clubs are found in India. In the early eighteenth century, India-related associations began to form in London. These took their names from locations familiar to those who had worked in India and beyond: the Calcutta Club, the Madras Club, the Bombay Club, the Shikar Club, and the China Club.²⁸ These early London-based clubs were, as the Victorian club observer Ralph Nevill noted, more associations than formal clubs, with a limited breadth of service, hours, and offerings.²⁹

India has a separate, vibrant, and long history of forms of associational life. From the late Vedic period (c. 600 BCE) new forms of association took root. These were various forms of meetings, assemblies, societies, or councils and come down to us today as sabhas, samajas, samitis, parishads, vidathas, and later addas. These forms of association changed over time, while some of the nomenclature has continued to be used to the present. During the Buddhist period of Indian history (c. 500 BCE to 600 CE) another associational form arose, the community of monks known as the sangham. Further, the arrival and establishment of Islam in the subcontinent brought its own forms of associational life, from local madrasas with their regular attendees, to Sufi orders and their congregation at specific shrines, to the limited ‘club’ or association of those closest to a ruler. In addition, up to and through the nineteenth century India had other forms of associational life in coffee houses, bazaars, and locations where people met to listen, converse, and probably to share some sense of community.³⁰ This Indian associational milieu seems to have been limited in breadth, and thus it would be difficult to call these pre-nineteenth-century forms a civil society in the same way we see a kind of civil society emerge in nineteenth-century India. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as Partha Chatterjee has suggested for sociability in Bengal, associational life was not only alive and well, but a marker of South Asia’s early modern period.³¹ Some of these associational forms equipped members with social and civic skills similar to those inculcated by clubs. Some of these included the Asiatic Society (1784), the Brahmo Samaj (1828), and the Dharma Sabha (1830) all of which originated in Bengal (the latter two opening after the Bengal Club). These types of association, as Carey Watt has argued, were ‘in effect making the Indian nation.’³²

One associational form recognized as a kind of precursor and informal parallel to clubs comes from Bengal. The region has long been famous for its nightly discussion groups held in private homes, the adda. As clubs opened in Bengal, they were recognized as being, in some ways, a more formalized extension of the adda. The Dhaka Club (1911) made such a connection explicit, recognizing both the private nature of the club and comparing it with the private ‘closed’ nature of some addas.³³ The addas, sabhas, samajas, and other associations all helped foster new communities of individuals who sought to organize themselves around a type of membership or belonging. While forms of associational life were not new in India, when the British established the first European-style club, that particular form of associational life was new, replete with an organized membership, rules, fees, and so on. As C.A. Bayly has argued for Britain’s information order being established on ‘the foundation of its Indian precursors,’ so too we see the Indian foundation for associational life predating British rule, and being built upon with the addition of associational forms like the club.³⁴

At the end of the eighteenth century, members of the East India Company began to open clubs including the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (1792) and the Royal Western India Turf Club (1810).³⁵ Up to this point, Indian associational forms had not yet affiliated with each other, nor had these early British clubs taken on all the trappings of a social club. The year 1827 was vital in the history of associational life and India’s clubland, for in that year the Bengal Club opened. From that time until 1857 – the year of the Indian uprising – Britons in urban centers followed Calcutta’s lead and opened their own clubs.³⁶ Some did not admit Indians as full members but did have varying degrees of Indian participation. At the same time, it is possible that some Indians opened their own clubs. Perhaps they were small affairs nestled in urban centers and have not yet been brought to light in the historical record, or perhaps the idea of a club – in the British and European sense – simply had not yet caught on.

As Figure 1 graphically illustrates, the heyday of India’s club growth was in the three decades after 1857. At this time, Britons increasingly abstained from mingling in Indian society (the days of the ‘White Mughals’ now being over), and the club provided an ideal escape. Yet for all the forces that pulled Indians and Britons in separate directions after 1857, opposite forces were bringing them together. Some clubs that opened in the years immediately after 1857 served the very purpose of encouraging ‘social intercourse,’ that is, a form of bridging between Indians and Britons. Three decades earlier in 1828, Raja Rammohun Roy, often called the ‘father of modern India,’ predicted that Indians, through ‘constant intercourse with Europeans,’ might one day ‘resist’ those aspects of British rule that did not suit them. Roy foresaw not only the rise of the Indian nationalist movement, but understood the role of Indo-British socializing.³⁷ A liberal strand in both communities sought to avert events like 1857 by cultivating new bonds between them, a task best accomplished, some believed, through a club. Calcutta hosted the Union Club, established in 1859, whose stated purpose was ‘to promote friendly social intercourse between European and Native gentlemen.’³⁸ It has been suggested that Indians and Europeans pursued a sort of separate but equal practice in their social spheres, including clubs, ‘without coming together in the same institutions,’ but clubs like the Union Club and others put such assertions in need of reassessment.³⁹ By 1871, when the government conducted a census, the idea of the club (as well as its cousin, the hotel) had become part of the Indian vernacular. In his 1883 report on the census, W. Chichele Plowden wrote, ‘The words hotel and club have grown into native language, and the things they mean have come into existence in the last few years.’⁴⁰ Thus, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, enough clubs had opened in enough locations that the idea of a ‘club’ had entered vernacular languages. Awareness of club culture and its ceremonialism prompted one playful group in Calcutta to form the Unceremonials Club (1888). Members organized the club as an entertainment venue ‘so long as the lease lasts,’ and infused with a spirit of silliness, they distinguished themselves by wearing red caps, red smoking jackets, and red ties.⁴¹

After 1857, Indians also began opening their own clubs. These clubs, like their British counterparts, were opened for a variety of reasons. For some, being rebuffed from admission to a British club roused the desire to open an Indian counterpart. Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, an Indian industrialist, was not admitted to the Bengal Club (so the legend goes) and decided to open a new club where Indians and Britons would have equal access.⁴² This became the Calcutta Club (1907). Most Indian clubs were not tit-for-tat responses whereby the new club would bar Britons; rather – more liberally – they welcomed both Indian and British members. In the Deccan, officials in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s government opened their own club, the Nizam’s Club (1884). It catered to the city’s Indian elite and British members alike. Like many Indian-run clubs, the Nizam’s Club served as an alternative and counterpart to the largely British Secunderabad Club (1878). Members of some of India’s religious communities also opened clubs; for instance, the Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims of Bombay all created separate gymkhana clubs for their communities.⁴³

Figure 1. Club openings 1800–1900

Based on data from E.C. Austen Leigh, A List of English Clubs in All Parts of the World for 1907 (London: Spottiswoode, 1907), pp. 167–77. Not every club from this source had an establishment date given. 125 of 146 clubs from this list have establishment dates.

The period from 1900 to 1947 witnessed club growth in new areas. Many women’s clubs opened in these decades. By this time, Indian women were increasingly participating in India’s public and political life, and thus a club became a respectable destination for women moving out of the home and into the public sphere. For instance, the Begum of Bhopal opened the Princess of Wales Club (1909) specifically for the betterment of the women of Bhopal. In the south, women including Radhabai Subbarayan opened clubs like the Ladies’ Recreation Club in Madras (1911), the Nilgiri Ladies’ Club of Ootacamund, and