Clubs are among the stubbornly enduring legacies of the Raj. The Brits used them to secure hierarchy and legitimise the notion of the elite in cities like Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. Actually, the long arm of the British Raj ferreted its way into even some of the last outposts in the hinterland. Gymkhanas became ubiquitous: any place that can call itself a city got one. The brown sahibs took over from their gora predecessors.

But lately, something has been happening in this rarefied world, where as recently as the ’80s, the menu in the verdant Delhi Gymkhana boasted a popular dish called ‘native chicken’. Alas, I am not a member of this August club with only natives at the helm. The inimitable Khushwant Singh gleefully told me about this years ago. Not quite believing my former boss – a formidable raconteur with a vivid imagination and an eternal twinkle in his mischievous eyes – I went down to the gymkhana to check. And sure enough there it was on the menu. Anticlimax: native chicken was just plain old chicken curry that the neo-pucca sahibs tackled with knives and forks. None too dexterously I have to add. I’ve even spotted an elegantly turned out retired bureaucrat of the old order eating parathas with a fork and knife.

Fortunately the spirit of swaraj finally made it into the kitchen. Out went the anachronisms. Punjabi cuisine made an entrée on the menu — even dahi vadas and rajma. Today, there is even a Chinese restaurant with the requisite Chini-Punjabi cuisine. But the real desecration of the Delhi Gymkhana began with the arrival of the kitty party. On a particularly unlucky day (I suppose one woman’s music is another’s cacophony) there was a group consisting of nearly 20 women spanning several decades in the Chinese restaurant. Dressed to the hilt on that sultry summer day and weighed down by armours of jewellery they chattered on at the top of their voices while they counted their bundles of notes with the practiced ease of a Las Vegas croupier.

Nomadic clubbing
Perhaps the spirit of the Raj lives on more robustly in another breed of clubs – those with no fixed address. You could call them nomadic clubbies. The Oxford and Cambridge Society of India is one such. If I may digress a bit…. And dear reader don’t get me wrong: I am not showing off. I went to college on the other side of the big pond, in yet another former colony of Great Britain. And, my accent is far from plummy. I just went along with my husband who spent a couple of stints as a visiting professor at Oxford.

Come to think of it the city of dreaming spires itself is, or was then (early ’90s) like an old boys club. My husband was at New College, which, despite its name, is one of the oldest colleges of Oxford University. Spouses those days were not welcome to sup with the gowned elite at the High Table. Some of the other colleges had by then let in the wives of the dons and allowed them to partake of their ritualised repasts. But New College was one of the staunchest torchbearers of tradition. So, you can understand my resentment at being left behind. The Inspector Morse series, set in this unbelievably beautiful place, was my guide to the quaint rituals and customs of the university. my brooding resentment soon turned to amusement. The wife of a senior don – he might have been the president of the college if my memory serves me right – invited a group of the wives of visiting dons to dinner in her rooms overlooking the dining room where the dons were to assemble for a special evening. This way we could “watch the men eating from above”. She said this without a trace of irony in her voice, nor even a soupcon of humour. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Of course, I declined. To me it seemed like pornography of sorts playing peeping Jane, watching the eggheads down port and the finest of wines. I didn’t need to go halfway round the world to peep into the world of men from a zenana of sorts. We had enough of it at home: all this we can see them but they can’t see us stuff.

But I digress. Meanwhile, back home nostalgia still rules, though tempered a bit by shifting ground realities, at the nomadic Oxford and Cambridge Society of India. The annual ritual of ‘watching’ (usually in the sprawling well-manicured lawns of the British High Commissioner’s residence and certainly not in real time) the do-or-die boat race between Cambridge and Oxford taking place thousands of miles away continues to generate simulated excitement. Alumni of the winning side pat themselves on the back. Over the years their Oxbridge accents have acquired the lilt of our native tongues, with the odd exception of desi versions of characters out of a PG Wodehouse story. Visiting the old boys in neighbouring Pakistan gains precedence over the boat race. But the hallowed grounds of Oxbridge still beckon.