The club

Not all sites of colonial sociability were medically sanctioned. In many colonial settings, the club acted as a space where colonial hierarchies, sociabilities and networks all came into play.

In Burmese Days (1934), George Orwell remarks: ‘In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.’ For clarity’s sake, Orwell adds that the ramshackle club in question, the Kyaktada Club, never admitted Asians, although other clubs in the Raj were beginning to do so at the time.⁴³ This view of rigid boundaries has recently been challenged by Benjamin Cohen, who sees greater mixity in the clubs of the British Raj: he accounts for women’s clubs, which he contends were mostly ‘interracial’, for contact between not just Asians and Europeans, but also among Hindus and Muslims, most notably. Consider, for example, the Nilgiri Ladies’ Club at the hill station of Ootacamund, which counted thirty-two Indian members for twenty-three European ones.⁴⁴ Certainly, the fact remains that these clubs fostered and perpetuated elite statuses—a gilt-edged institution at a swanky hill station, itself already a deeply segregated place designed to escape India, can hardly qualify as a case of colonial subversion. However, Cohen and others are no doubt correct to underscore the complexity of colonial society and its splintering, not to mention the failure of colonial hermetic separation schemes. Similar trends seem at work elsewhere. It was in the 1930s, for instance, that the Vietnamese bourgeoisie began to forge its way onto the dance floor and the fauteuils of Dalat’s cercle, the French colonial equivalent of the British club.

Some have suggested that the club’s intrinsically social nature was designed to shame Britons into greater temperance or even ‘social self-regulation’.⁴⁵ Yet, as one of the characters in Burmese Days remarks, in point of fact, the rivers of alcohol consumed at these clubs in some ways constituted ‘the cement of empire’.⁴⁶ Although every bit as much a metropolitan clone as the hill station itself, the club did fulfil subtly different roles in colonial settings. As Mrinalini Sinha has noted, whereas in Britain clubs drew the ire of some social critics intent on bringing men into the family hearth, in the colonies the club was generally perceived as facilitating ‘desirable domestic arrangements among elite Europeans in India’. The club thus served a different function in this colonial setting that featured a large gender disparity: 45,000 European women for roughly 112,000 European men in British India in 1921.⁴⁷

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

The club

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