Perhaps the best-remembered thing that the late Groucho Marx ever said was his comment on clubs.
He would not join a club, he stated, because any club that was willing to admit people like him was clearly not worth joining. That remark became the centerpiece of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and it lent its name to the trendy 1990s London media club, The Groucho.
I don’t like clubs. Never have. And never will. But my reasons are quite different from Groucho’s. I have no objection to joining a club that unites people with similar interests. But I loathe the idea of clubs where a committee looks at your background and your ethnicity before deciding whether you are socially acceptable. The whole idea of judging people’s social standing strikes me as being nauseating and offensive.
Many people in other countries feel the same way. In the US, there aren’t that many clubs in the cities but the country club phenomenon is well established. These clubs usually comprise members of the wealthy, local elite. For decades, most of them refused to accept Jews and in some cases, Americans of Italian or Hispanic origin. And the only Blacks who ever got in were the serving staff.
But the idea of a club within a city is a peculiarly British one. In London, there are gentlemen’s club that still frown on admitting women and where the concept of blackballing is still current. The way it works is that a single member of the selection committee can raise an objection and bar your entry. Because Britain is still such a class-ridden society with a clubby network at the very top, such institutions continue to flourish.
The British took the idea of clubs to every corner of the Empire. Though the clubs now try and conceal this, the basic idea was to create places where White people could meet on equal terms while Brown and Black people served the food. In India, for instance, the Bombay Gymkhana was a Whites Only club. So was the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. The story goes that when Jamsetji Tata was denied entry into the Yacht Club, he vowed to build India’s grandest hotel next door. And that’s how the Bombay Taj was constructed.
| "The truth is that these clubs only regard Indian dress as unsuitable. Wear a purple checked coat with a yellow flower in your lapel and a Panama hat and they will usher you in with much bowing and scraping." |
Towards the end of Empire, the British decided that perhaps it was a good idea to meet the odd native in a convivial surrounding. The Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, established the Willingdon Club as an establishment where locals could suck up to the Brit elite. At the time, this was considered a huge breakthrough. Much later, the Breach Candy Club in Bombay continued to deny membership to Indians. Well into the late 60s, the club would gladly welcome any merchant seaman or tramp with a foreign passport while Indians would be told to stay away. Eventually, when Murli Deora, as Mayor of Bombay, threatened to cut off the club’s water supply, it relented and let the natives in. These days, the club is Indian run and there is no Whites Only Policy.
I mention all this as the background to a recent controversy where a club in Madras refused entry to a man in a dhoti. This is not without precedent. In the 90s, a club in Calcutta refused to allow the famous musician, Ananda Shankar, to remain on its premises because he was wearing churidars. And of course, there have been many such cases over the last few decades.
The argument offered by the clubs in their defence is simple enough. They are private establishments and their members have every right to decide what kind of attire is appropriate. If you don’t approve of the dress code, then don’t bother turning up. Why should you arrive inappropriately dressed and then raise a hue and cry when the club explains that your attire is unsuitable?
At first glance, this explanation sounds reasonable enough. But on closer examination, the rationale falls apart. Appropriate dress? Suppose I turned up at one of these clubs at 4 in the afternoon on a hot summer’s day wearing a tailcoat with a white bow tie and a golfing beret? Nobody would regard this as being appropriate for that hour. And yet, I doubt very much if any of these elite clubs would deny entry. I searched in vain for instances where a person in any form of Western dress (other than shorts) had been told that his clothes were not suitable.
The truth is that these clubs only regard Indian dress as unsuitable. Wear a purple checked coat with a yellow flower in your lapel and a Panama hat and they will usher you in with much bowing and scraping. But if you turn up in an elegant kurta-churidar they will look at you as though you are part of the hired help and should be making deliveries at the service entrance.
It’s not really a question of formal or informal, of aesthetic or unaesthetic, or of tasteful or tasteless. When it comes to dress codes, clubs go back to their old imperial routes when wogs were not allowed in. Even though the natives are now in charge, they still slavishly follow the rules set down by the very imperial masters who would have denied entry to their grandfathers.
So, when it comes to clubs and dress codes, I am firmly on the side of the dhotiwallahs and the kurta fellows. We are a free country now. We should take pride in our heritage and our clothing traditions. And as for those Brown people who still hanker for the days of the Raj and unthinkingly impose those dress codes, it’s time to wake up and smell independence. Let’s not be prisoners of a colonial mindset any longer. God knows, it’s been long enough since the British left!
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