Letter from India:The Calcutta Club, one of India's oldest and stuffiest, marked the centenary of its founding last week by admitting its first female members, writes Rahul Bedi.
Some 4,700 club male members voted in the erstwhile imperial capital city in eastern India to grant two women membership in an attempt to break with colonial tradition that still abounds in similarly exclusive institutions across the country. However, there remains a chauvinistic codicil to their membership reminiscent of old times: the club bar remains a male preserve.
"If lady members decide they want their own bar, they can have one," club president Dipak Mukherjee said. For now, they can patronise only the specially designated "mixed bar".
The decision by the Calcutta Club to admit women followed years of pressure from prominent figures, including state governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma who, two years ago, refused to attend a stag party there because his wife was not permitted entry.
Others lobbied that the club should open its doors to women as its founding in 1907 was predicated to non-discrimination.
It was established after the viceroy, Lord Minto, invited prominent local industrialist Rajen Mookerjee to dinner at the exclusive Bengal Club then Calcutta's most exalted. However, as the Bengal Club did not permit entry to non-whites, it erected a special tent outside the main premises for the viceroy's dinner.
The slighted Mookerjee and others almost immediately established the Calcutta Club, India's first without a racist membership policy, but it upheld prevailing colonial tradition. It barred women by keeping membership open only for "folks we like", a droll euphemism for keeping the club premises an all-male preserve.
Even though women are now widely accepted in almost all such institutions across India, they continue to be barred from many of their men-only bars They are barred from the sprawling 139-year-old Bangalore Club named after the city in the south that is the country's information technology capital. Sixty years after independence, the spirit of the English sahibs and their equally snobbish memsahibs still haunts the raj's many charming clubs across India, created by the colonists as a genteel refuge from the heaving, native hordes.
So enduring was the legacy of these colonial-era clubs that until the late 1990s, the Royal Yacht Club in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), facing the Gateway of India built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to India in 1911, flew the British flag from its ramparts.
Although the last British troops to leave India passed through this massive Gateway built in the Indo-Saracenic style, the yacht club continued with its whites-only membership policy for nearly 15 years after independence in 1947. Even after it admitted Indians as members, they were actively discouraged from participating in most club activities other than sailing.
Mumbai's other nearby exclusive Breach Candy Club, which had "dogs and Indians not allowed" prominently signposted at its entrance until well after independence, has somewhat mellowed, but only marginally.
It now admits Indians, provided they are proposed by club trust members who perforce are required to be European passport holders.
With their impressive colonial architecture, cavernous bars and dining rooms, lush lawns and liveried staff, scores of India's Raj-era clubs continue to be patronised by the rich and privileged, desperate to preserve the outward trappings of "exclusivity" in a rapidly changing social and economic milieu.
Applicants like film stars and politicians are, like during the raj, subtly denied entry into Mumbai's imposing and immaculately kept Willingdon Club, a quintessential colonial institution in structure and ambience.
Racehorse owners and jockeys from the adjoining turf club too need not apply; they run the real risk of being blackballed.
A western male dress code too is strictly enforced in India's top clubs, with little or no quarter given either to the searing hot climate or traditional sartorial styles. Loose-fitting kurtas or knee-length shirts and billowing pyjama-like trousers - prime minister Manmohan Singh's favoured dress - or even elegant, starched dhotis, a kind of stylishly tied sarong, are banned. Sandals are grudgingly permitted provided they are "substantially genteel and cover portions of the foot and ankle".
Some years ago, the head of Bangalore's prestigious National Law School arrived at the Bangalore Club in an elegant white dhoti to celebrate India's Republic Day. He did not make it past the reception and later resigned his membership in protest at the club's "colonialism".
Earlier, a ban imposed on a similarly dressed MP in the capital New Delhi's prestigious Gymkhana Club was the subject of a heated and extended parliamentary debate.
But the embargo stayed and remains.
Membership to these anachronistic clubs, that appear to exist primarily as social watering holes for the "right sort" of people to perpetuate their limited existences, is difficult and the waiting lists seemingly interminable.
It would, for instance, take an aspirant applying now 32 years to join Delhi's Gymkhana Club. Provided, of course, the applicant has what passes for the "right" social pedigree and an "acceptable" stiff upper lip.