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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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- Journal of British Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 4: At Home in the Empire , October 2001 , pp. 489 - 521
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- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2001
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).
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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.
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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. 50–51Google 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.
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107 Cited in Sinha, M. K., In My Father's Footsteps: A Policeman's Odyssey, 1908–1980 (Delhi, 1981), p. 24Google Scholar.
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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.
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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. 95–105Google 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.
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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.
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