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Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

The ubiquity of the European social club in the European empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been widely recognized in both popular and academic writings on European, and particularly British, imperialism. The “European” ascription of imperial social clubs derived from their predominantly whites-only membership policy in which all elite Europeans, whatever their nationalities, were potentially included. Although each individual club often catered to a very different and distinctive clientele among elite Europeans in the empire, the “clubland” as a whole served as a common ground where elite Europeans could meet as members, or as guests of members, of individual clubs. These clubs, it has been argued, represented an oasis of European culture in the colonies, functioning to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of “home” for Europeans living in an alien land. The popular narrative of the club, as is evident from the account by the official historian of the Bengal Club, one of the oldest social clubs in India, easily oscillated between an understanding of the club as a broadly European cultural institution and as a specifically British one. Either way, the cultural values that it represented were understood as transplanted to the colonies: “It is the practice of European peoples to reproduce as far as possible in their settlements and colonies in other continents the characteristic social features of their natural lives …. For more than a century no institution has been more peculiarly British than the social club.”

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Research Article
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001

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References

1 The focus of this article, for reasons that will be obvious, is on the “gentleman's clubs” as opposed to the far more numerous “working men's clubs” in Britain and their counterparts in the empire. The emphasis here, moreover, is on social clubs as opposed to clubs that were formed for specific purposes such as the numerous “sporting clubs.”

2 During the outbreak of war, however, some of the clubs in India, as in Britain, imposed certain restrictions on members from enemy countries. The Bengal Club, like the Oriental Club in London, put a ban on Europeans of German or Austrian descent in 1916; see Club Committee Meeting, 27 June 1916, Committee Proceedings of the Bengal Club, 1906–1919, Bengal Club Archives, Calcutta, India (BCA).

3 Panckridge, H. R., A Short History of the Bengal Club, 1827–1927 (Calcutta, 1927), p. 1Google Scholar, emphasis added.

4 Quoted in Hunt, Roland and Harrison, John, The District Officer in India, 1930–1947 (London, 1980), pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

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6 See Chirol, Valentine, Indian Unrest (1910; reprint, New Delhi, 1979), p. 290Google Scholar. There was even a popular myth among the British that Motilal Nehru, the famous member of the Congress, had turned against British rule because he had been “blackballed” at the Allahabad Club. This myth was successfully challenged by his son; see Nehru, Jawaharlal, An Autobiography (1937; reprint, New Delhi, 1988), pp. 287–88Google Scholar. I have retained the popular nineteenth-century usage of the term “Anglo Indian” to refer to the British in India. It was only later in the twentieth century that the term came to signify an individual of “mixed” British and Indian parentage.

7 There has been little serious scholarship on the clubs despite the recent proliferation of work on “imperial culture.” Rich's, Paul J., Chains of Empire: English Public Schools, Masonic Cabalism, Historical Causality and Imperial Clubdom (London, 1991)Google Scholar remains one of the few books to engage with the implications of clubland in the empire. Also see Chan, Wai Kwan, The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong (New York, 1991), pp. 3840Google Scholar.

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11 My thinking about a distinctively “colonial public sphere” draws, of course, from the analysis of the classic bourgeois public sphere in the work of Jürgen Habermas; see his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar; originally published in Berlin in 1962. See also Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston, 1992)Google Scholar. For the literature on “the public” in colonial India, see the editor's introduction and the essays in Freitag, Sandra B., ed., special issue on the “public,” South Asia, 14, no. 1 (1991), esp. 1–13Google Scholar; also see Sarkar, Tanika, “Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal,” Studies in History 1, no. 1 (1997): 6395CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 While Christopher Bayly calls for reintegrating the British and Britain into studies of South Asia, I argue for an emphasis on the specifically “colonial” dimension—neither entirely British nor Indian—of public life under the Raj. See Bayly, Christopher A., “Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony,” South Asia 17, no. 2 (1994): 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See Clark, Peter, British Clubs and Societies, c. 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar. Unfortunately, I was unable to make use of this book in time for this article.

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21 See Panckridge, , A Short History, pp. 12Google Scholar; and Pioneer (30 April 1880) on the East India United Services Club. See also Forrest, Denys, The Oriental Life Story of a West End Club (1968; reprint, London, 1979)Google Scholar.

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29 For the marketing of imperialism in Britain in the late nineteenth century, see ibid. Other titles in the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series also demonstrate the impact of imperialism on British culture; for some examples, see Richards, Jeffrey, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar; Mackenzie, John, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar; Mangan, J. A., ed., Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar.

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35 For a spoof on the clubs along these lines see Timbs, John, Club Life of London (London, 1886), 1:248Google Scholar. Timbs quotes from a poem by a Mr. Hood entitled “Clubs Turned up by a Female Hand”: “of all the modern schemes of man / That time has brought to bear / A plague upon the wicked plan / That parts the wedded pair / My female friends they all agree / They hardly know their hubs; / And heart and voice unite with me / We hate the name of Clubs!” For bourgeois domesticity as an important site for the construction of nineteenth-century middle-class masculinity in Britain, see Tosh, John, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999)Google Scholar.

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40 Partha Chatterjee, in a different context, has already complicated the usefulness of the public/private dichotomy when extended to civil society in colonial India; see his The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), pp. 235–53Google Scholar.

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45 This is how Dennis Kincaid explains the “club-addiction” of Anglo-Indian society; see his British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (1938; reprint, New York, 1971), p. 281Google Scholar.

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66 An anonymous British soldier, describing his life in late nineteenth-century India, contends that the social chasm dividing the “upper” and “lower” class Europeans was greater in India than in Britain; see H.S., The Young Soldier in India: His Life and Prospects (London, 1889), pp. 202–5Google Scholar. For the military, which accounted for the majority of the European presence in India, see Stanley, Peter, White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–1875 (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

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84 For the patronage of the governor-general and then the viceroy, see ibid., p. 70. For a brief history of the European and Anglo Indian Defence Association, see Renford, Raymond K., The Non-Official British in India to 1920 (Delhi, 1987)Google Scholar.

85 Englishman (8 March 1883), p. 2Google ScholarPubMed.

86 See Renford, , Non-Official British in India, p. 335Google Scholar.

87 Pioneer (28 April 1883), p. 1Google ScholarPubMed.

88 Committee Proceedings of the Bengal Club, 1906–1919, BCA, p. 245.

89 Cited in Allen, , Plain Tales, p. 104Google Scholar.

90 Horne, , Work and Sport in the Old ICS, pp. 101–2Google Scholar. White women were just as likely to offer similar defenses of the club; see the similarity in Ethel Savi's defense of the club quoted in Greenberger , Allen J., “Englishwomen in India,” British History Illustrated 4 (1978): 46Google Scholar.

91 For some salutary reminders of the importance of reinscribing class—as much as race and gender—into contemporary analyses of the working of colonialism, see Ahmed, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, 1992)Google Scholar; and Sarkar, Sumit, Writing Social History (Delhi, 1998)Google Scholar.

92 See Choudhury, Ranabina Ray, ed., Calcutta: A Hundred Years Ago (Bombay, 1988), p. 46Google Scholar.

93 Ibid. See also Statesman (23 March 1883), p. 3Google ScholarPubMed; and the report in the Illustrated London News (25 August 1887) on the maharaja's role in founding the club, cited in Vadgama, Kusoom, India in Britain: The Indian Contribution to the British Way of Life (London, 1984), p. 52Google Scholar. Dev's, Benay KrishanThe Early History and Growth of Calcutta (1905; reprint, Calcutta, 1977), p. 175Google Scholar, however, attributes the foundation of the club to Keshub Chunder Sen, the maharaja's father-in-law.

94 Statesman (24 March 1882), p. 3Google ScholarPubMed.

95 Among the Indian members some prominent names included the following: R. C. Mitter, Jotendra Mohun Tagore, Rajendra Lala Mitra, Nawab Abdool Luteef, H. M. Rustomjee, Keshub Chunder Sen, Bankim Chandra Chattterjee, and Rev. K. M. Bannerjee. Some prominent European members, included Sir Henry Harrison, chairman of the Calcutta Corporation; Sir Henry Cotton of the ICS; and Rev. Father Lafont. Harry Lee, Harrison's successor at the Calcutta Corporation, also played an active role in the club. See Choudhury, , Calcutta, pp. 132–33Google ScholarPubMed; Hindoo Patriot (16 June 1883), p. 280Google Scholar; and Hindoo Patriot (18 August 1890), pp. 390–91Google Scholar.

96 The membership on 31 December 1888 was 763; see Bengal Club Annual Accounts Book, 1860–1890, BCA, pp. 77.

97 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, India under Ripon (London, 1909), p. 115Google Scholar.

98 Quoted in Choudhury, , Calcutta, p. 46Google ScholarPubMed.

99 Pioneer (28 April 1883), p. 1Google ScholarPubMed.

100 The incident was first reported in the Indian Daily News. It prompted one European member of the club to resign in protest, see Englishman (3 April 1883), p. 3Google ScholarPubMed. Indians present, however, denied that such an incident had taken place in the club, see Englishman (6 April 1883), p. 2Google ScholarPubMed.

101 See Gandhi, M. K., An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Desai, Mahadev (Boston, 1957), p. 229Google Scholar; originally published in Ahmedabad, India, in two volumes in 1927 and 1929.

102 Brajendranath, De, “Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the ICS,” Calcutta Review 32, no. 2 (August 1954): 95Google Scholar.

103 Ananda Bazar Patrika (9 April 1993), p. 167Google Scholar, in Report on Native Papers Bengal Presidency (January-December 1883), no. 16.

104 See Shukla, J. D., Indianisation of All-India Services and Its Impact on Administration (New Delhi, 1982)Google Scholar. For the transformation of the ICS, also see Potter, David, India's Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. Several contemporary memoirs testify to the awkwardness created by the ban on entertaining Indian guests in the clubs; for Anglo-Indian accounts see Cotton, , New India, pp. 5051Google Scholar; and SirLawrence, Walter Roper, The India We Served (London, 1928), p. 16Google Scholar; for accounts by Indians see the recollections of M. A. Hussein of the ICS (Punjab cadre) quoted in Hunt, and Harrison, , District Officer, p. 127Google Scholar.

105 Cited in Hunt, and Harrison, , District Officer, pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

106 Vira, Dharam, Memoirs of a Civil Servant (London, 1975), p. 1617Google Scholar.

107 Cited in Sinha, M. K., In My Father's Footsteps: A Policeman's Odyssey, 1908–1980 (Delhi, 1981), p. 24Google Scholar.

108 See various individual memoirs, for example: Menon, K. P. S., Many Worlds: An Autobiography (London, 1965), esp. pp. 89147Google Scholar; Chettur, S. K., The Steel Frame and I: Life in the ICS (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Rai, E. N. Mangat, Commitment My Style: Career in the Indian Civil Service (Delhi, 1973)Google Scholar; [Nehra, A.], Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman (London, 1934)Google Scholar; Rustomjee, Nari, Enchanted Frontiers (Bombay, 1971)Google Scholar; and Tyabji, Badr-ud-din, Memoirs of an Egoist, vol. 1, 1907–1956 (New Delhi, 1988)Google Scholar. See also the recollections of Indian ICS officers in Punjabi, K. L., The Civil Servant in India (Bombay, 1965)Google Scholar and Hunt and Harrison, District Officer.

109 See Hunt, and Harrison, , District Officer, pp. 126–27, 29Google Scholar.

110 Cited in Masani, Zareer, Indian Tales of the Raj (London, 1987), p. 53Google Scholar.

111 Cited in Ray, Rajat, Urban Roots, pp. 231–32Google Scholar.

112 The incident involving Willingdon is mentioned in Trevelyan, Humphrey, The India We Left: Charles Trevelyan, 1826–1865, Humphrey Trevelyan, 1929–1947 (London, 1972), pp. 112–13Google Scholar. Details are also given in Masani, , Indian Tales, pp. 5152Google Scholar. While Indian princes were not allowed in the clubs in British India, they belonged to the same clubs as Europeans in their own princely states; see the recollections of the son of the Nawab of Palanpur in Allen, Charles and Diwedi, Sharada, Lives of the Indian Princes (London, 1984), p. 158Google Scholar.

113 See Calcutta Club: Memorandum and Articles of Association 1922, National Library, Calcutta, pp. 48, 51Google Scholar.

114 Quoted in Masani, , Indian Tales, p. 52Google Scholar.

115 Quoted in ibid., p. 68. For the decline in the popularity of the clubs see also Kincaid, , British Social Life, pp. 276–77Google Scholar. For one Anglo Indian's perception of the growing “crises of whiteness” in late colonial India, see Schwarz, Bill, “An Englishman Abroad … and at Home: The Case of Paul Scott,” New Formations, no. 17 (Summer 1992), pp. 95105Google Scholar.

116 Cited in Bonnerjee, N. B., Under Two Masters (Calcutta, 1970), pp. 117–18Google Scholar.

117 Ibid.

118 Quoted in Masani, , Indian Tales, p. 16Google Scholar

119 Ibid., p. 25.

120 Ibid., p. 55. There were many others, of course, who made full use of the social opportunities for bridge, sports, and other activities that the clubs provided, see Sengupta, Padmini [Sathianadhan], The Portrait of an Indian Woman (Calcutta, 1956)Google Scholar.

121 See Rau, Dhanvanthi Rama, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London, 1977), pp. 99–100, 119Google Scholar.

122 See Letter From Sorabji to Elena [Alice Bruce] Richmond, dated 24 February 1926, in “Cornelia Sorabji Papers: Correspondence and Private Papers,” January-April 1926, India Office Library and Records, London, folder no. 40.

123 See report of the incident in Renford, , Non-Official British, pp. 309–11Google Scholar.

124 See the recollection of this episode in Dutt, Kalpana, Chittagong Armoury Raider's Reminiscences (1945; reprint, New Delhi, 1979), pp. 4044Google Scholar. For Indian women's participation in revolutionary terrorist organizations, see Forbes, Geraldine H., “Goddesses or Rebels: The Women Revolutionaries of Bengal,” in Women, Politics and Literature in Bengal, ed. Seeley, Clinton B. (East Lansing, Mich. 1981), pp. 317Google Scholar.

125 For a recollection of this incident, see the writings of Indian suffragist Sen, Mrinalini, Knocking at the Door: Lectures and Other Writings (Calcutta, 1954), p. 150Google Scholar.

126 The Lyceum Club was founded on 20 June 1904 as a place where “women of every nationality meet in a freedom of intercourse hitherto unavailable;” see the report on the tenth anniversary of the club in its paper, The Lyceum (June 1914), in Papers of Lady Strachey [longtime vice president of the Lyceum Club/, Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University, London, Box 92. Sarojini Naidu was, perhaps, among its earliest and most famous Indian members. Many important connections among Indian women, such as those among Naidu, Kamala Sathianadhan, Padmini Sengupta, and Hansa Mehta, had been cemented first in 1919 in the Lyceum Club in London, see Sengupta, Padmini [Sathianadhan], The Portrait of an Indian Woman (Calcutta, 1956), pp. 114–16Google Scholar; Sengupta, Padmini, Sarojini Naidu (Bombay, 1966), p. 158Google Scholar; and Mehta, Hansa, Indian Woman (Delhi, 1981), p. 188Google Scholar.

127 Vittachi, Varindra Tarzie, The Brown Sahib (London, 1962), p. 10Google Scholar; see also his The Brown Sahib Revisited (New Delhi, 1987)Google Scholar.

128 Midgley, Clare, “New Imperial Histories,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 547–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.