Colonial hangover: India's elite
clubs By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - India's rustic Railway
Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav might have captured
the attention of the world's top management
schools with his remarkable transformation of
Indian Railways from an ailing enterprise into a
profit-making organization, but the country's
social elite are not impressed.
A couple
of months ago, Yadav's application for membership
in Delhi's prestigious India International Center
was turned down. Intellectuals, artists, diplomats
and eminent public personalities
constitute the IIC's select
membership.
By no stretch of imagination
would Yadav fit the profile of the average IIC
member. Although he is today among India's most
powerful politicians - and very wealthy, too - he
is an outsider to Delhi's upper crust.
Yadav is low-caste and of very humble
origin. He is not sophisticated; nor does he dress
or speak "right". His broken English and accent
are the butt of many jokes in India. During his
seven-year stint as chief minister of Bihar state,
lawlessness, corruption and poverty reached
abysmal levels. His mismanagement of the state is
well known, but just as noteworthy is his
emergence as an internationally recognized
management guru.
Sources in the IIC insist
that it wasn't Yadav's background that determined
their decision to blackball him. They maintain
that his application was turned down because he
had several criminal cases pending against him.
However, IIC rules make no mention of criminal
cases being a disqualification for membership.
Yadav's rejection as reported in the media
raised few eyebrows, as nobody was really
surprised with the decision. The IIC is an elite
club and is proud of its exclusive membership. It
is, of course, not alone in its snobbery. Elite
clubs across India - the older they are, the more
conservative they are in their membership rules -
are reluctant to open their doors to those
representing the new social order, all in the name
of upholding traditions and standards.
Access to these clubs is restricted to the
few who became members decades ago and their sons
and daughters, to people who belong to the "right
families" and have the "right surnames". And it is
not just the less privileged who cannot hope for
access to these clubs. Even the newly affluent are
not welcome as members.
And the clubs are
not embarrassed by their snobbery. An official at
the Bangalore Club, one of India's oldest, told
Asia Times Online he is "proud that the club's
members are sophisticated and conservative in
their style".
"Sophisticated" is often
interpreted to mean "Western".
Founded in
1878, the Bangalore Club was, during colonial
rule, exclusively for use by British soldiers
stationed in the Bangalore cantonment. Among its
members then was Winston Churchill - he owed the
club Rs13 (about 30 US cents), which the club has
written off as an "unrecoverable debt".
Today, the club is of course open to
Indians but remains exclusive. It is proud of its
colonial heritage, but it has sometimes carried
this pride to absurd lengths. In 2002, it turned
away one of its members, Mohan Gopal - a respected
academic and director of Bangalore's law school -
from the club's main room for wearing the
dhoti-kurta (traditional Indian attire) to
a dinner to mark the country's Republic Day. Club
officials insisted that the dress code required
members to wear formal clothes for dinner and that
the dhoti-kurta was not a formal outfit.
Others at the dinner were in blazers,
half-sleeved shirts and even T-shirts, and club
officials had not objected, but dressing Indian
was not acceptable to them. The dhoti worn
with the khadi (hand-spun cotton)
kurta, incidentally, was the standard
attire of India's freedom fighters and continues
to be worn widely in the country.
Clubs in
communist Kolkata appear to be among the stuffiest
when it comes to dress codes. In the late 1990s,
eminent artist Maqbool Fida Hussain was denied
entry to the Calcutta Club for coming there
barefoot. In 1997, a retired civil servant was
denied entry to a wedding reception at the
Calcutta Swimming Club for "wearing a
kurta-pajama that [was] too khadi".
More recently, filmmaker Rituparna Ghosh
was turned away from the Calcutta Rowing Club for
being similarly attired. "These are incidents
involving well-known personalities. There are
hundreds of others who have been subjected to such
humiliation," said a member of the Tollygunge
Club.
Tollygunge Club, which forbids
dhoti-kurta in its dining room and bar,
finds itself in a bit of pickle today. Member A P
Dutta has filed a case against the club for
denying entry in December 2004 to one of his
guests who was wearing jodhpur breeches and
kurta. He was apparently asked by club
officials to move to a table in less clean
surroundings where snacks were being served.
What these clubs seem to forget is that
India's tropical climate is hardly suitable for
coats and ties and shoes.
During British
colonial rule, it was not uncommon to see boards
put up outside clubs and restaurants forbidding
entry to dogs and Indians. Today, Indians are
allowed into these clubs, but only those of a
certain class and background. Notices at entrances
to clubs say that drivers and maids of members
cannot eat there. And if you wear Indian attire,
you can expect to be thrown out.
Almost 60
years after India freed itself from colonial rule,
its elite clubs are yet to rid themselves of the
colonial hangover.
Sudha
Ramachandran is an independent
journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
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