Biting a Club Sandwich in Chappals: Different Footwear, Same Gymkhana Door

It has long been the settled conviction of a certain stratum of Delhi society that the city's troubles, its air, its floods, its interminable queues are, at their constitutional core, problems belonging to someone else. This conviction is nowhere more elegantly maintained than at the Delhi Gymkhana Club, that venerable citadel of teak panelling and inherited surnames, where the waiting list for membership has historically moved faster than the waiting list for, say, justice.

And so it is with a warmth that can only be described as neighbourly that one notes: the Gymkhana is, at present, in something of a situation.

Scrutiny has arrived, uninvited, like a guest who has not been properly vetted, and the membership is reportedly displeased. This is understandable. The entire architectural logic of a club is the assumption that unpleasantness can be kept on the other side of a door with a very fine brass handle. One joins so that one need not encounter, in any meaningful sense, the city one inhabits.

One is reminded, with perhaps unseemly pleasure, of an earlier episode: the occasion some years ago when the millionaire's row in Gurugram discovered, during a particularly vigorous downpour, that luxury automobiles are not, in the event, boats. The cars floated. The schadenfreude, one regrets to report, also floated buoyant, unsinkable, bobbing cheerfully past every flood-facing balcony.

Pollution, the rains, and apparently also regulatory attention: all equal-opportunity offenders, all magnificently indifferent to the laminated card in one's wallet.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

That was John Donne, who was not referring to club membership, but might as well have been.

The irony of institutions premised on "othering" is that they require, for their very sustenance, an Other. The Gymkhana is meaningful precisely because someone cannot join it. The riff-raff, in a structural sense, is load-bearing. Remove the unwashed and the entire edifice loses its point, its gravitational pull, the exquisite pleasure of belonging.

This is why clubs took such emphatic root in Indian soil. They did not need to invent hierarchy; they merely slipped into grooves already worn smooth by centuries of practice. The colonial club and the indigenous order of precedence recognised each other, nodded and agreed to collaborate.

Also read: After Years of Tussle, Union Govt Orders Delhi Gymkhana Club to be Vacated by June 5

And so, for years, one could eat what one wished and speak when one wished and congregate without suspicion, provided, of course, that one was the right sort of person. The freedoms of the privileged have always enjoyed a serene, unexamined quality. They are not called freedoms; they are called, simply: life. It is only when the other sort of person insists on living too; insists, impertinently, on eating, praying, reading, gathering, that the word "freedom" becomes necessary and, soon after, contested.

Every freedom, it turns out, is load-bearing. You may not care for the particular column being chipped away, but the roof does not consult your preferences before it comes down.

Which brings us back to the brass handle and the kerfuffle behind it. The Gymkhana's present difficulties, whatever their precise legal texture, arrive in a country where the shoe has spent a great many decades on a very specific foot. That the shoe should, periodically, relocate, or should find, as it were, a different foot entirely, or no foot at all is less a scandal than a consequence.

One might even call it poetic, were one the sort of person who used that word without embarrassment. One might note with the gentlest possible nudge that going shoeless is not, in all traditions, a mark of disgrace. In several, it is how one enters a place of significance.

The Gymkhana admin, should they be reading, may take that last observation however they wish.

And here, one confesses, is the rub. One could, in another dispensation, have mounted a defence. A club is a kind of freedom, the freedom to gather, to maintain a particular, unhurried, slightly dreary version of life; to have one's preferred brand of soda water and one's preferred brand of silence. These are not nothing. But the Gymkhana and its kind spent so many comfortable decades looking the other way when freedoms less decorative than soda water were being quietly revoked, when the wrong sort of person found their right to eat, to pray, to simply be, subject to a scrutiny far less procedural than whatever the club now faces that the defence, however technically available, has gone somewhat soft.

Also read: Guests Who Look Like 'Maids' Not Allowed in Delhi Gymkhana

One cannot spend years perfecting the art of the averted gaze and then, when the gaze finally swings around, expect the room to rise in one's honour. And so we find ourselves here: not angry, not even particularly moved, but merely watching, from behind the manicured hedge, with the detached interest of people who have, at various points, been on both sides of a door, and know rather too well what it sounds like when the bolt slides home.

And while one has derived, perhaps, slightly more pleasure than is strictly tasteful from watching the gin-and-bitters class discover that the bar has closed, one must resist the temptation to call this progress. Privilege has not been retired. It has merely been re-tailored. The English-speaking, Wren and Martin-quoting, collared-t-shirt-at-a-formal-dinner variety has received its marching orders, certainly, but the atelier is already busy. New cocoons are under construction, snug, well-appointed, better calibrated to the present mood their membership criteria no less exacting, no less devoted to the ancient art of deciding who does not qualify; merely legible, now, to a different set of people holding a different set of markers.

The oldest privilege, the one that was never about accent or club tie but about power itself, watches all of this with the serenity of an institution that has never once been asked to vacate. We have not stopped othering. We have simply promoted a new Other, issued new uniforms to the gatekeepers and rehung the same brass handle on a different door. The wheel turns, it turned for the club-wallah, with magnificent indifference to who is clinging to it and if one squints, from behind the manicured hedge, the face at the top looks remarkably familiar; it is just, one notices, wearing different footwear.

A disclosure, in the interest of fairness: The author of this piece has, himself, eaten the club sandwich. His late father, a man of much valour and style, was member of many such establishments  and  bequeathed him not merely a surname but, with it, a childhood measured out in chlorinated afternoons and bearer cheques for nimbu pani. A particular institution – its specific geography of corridors and cane furniture, its cool library and the sound of ceiling fans doing their slow unconvinced work above the card room – constitutes what one can only call a third place, in the fullest and most sentimental sense: not home, not school, but the place where a child learned that the world had edges, and that one was, for the moment, on the comfortable side of them. This is offered not as exculpation but as context. One bites the hand that fed one the club sandwich. It is the least one can do.

Sumeer Mathur is a communication professional with over two decades of experience. The views expressed are personal.

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