Delhi Gymkhana Club and the Democratic Value of 'Elite' Spaces

Some of the most consequential conversations in independent India were never minuted. They happened between the third and fourth holes, or over a second cup of tea in a reading room that smelled of old magazines and older opinions. They happened in the in-between, the unscheduled, the unremarkable hour that turns out, in retrospect, to have been anything but.We have spent considerable energy naming the informal instruments of global affairs. Panda diplomacy gave China and the US a language of goodwill that a summit could not have manufactured. Ping-pong diplomacy, improbably, cracked open one of the coldest relationships of the twentieth century. Cricket diplomacy has done quiet work on the subcontinent that no bilateral framework has managed to replicate.Science and technology cooperation, cultural exchange, vaccine solidarity during a pandemic—each of these has earned its nomenclature, its place in the lexicon of how nations and peoples actually build trust with one another.And, yet, one of India's most enduring, most densely populated informal arenas has gone unnamed. I want to call it what it is. Club diplomacy. Not as provocation. Not as irony.As a genuine and overdue description of what has been happening, for generations, inside the walls of institutions that are too often dismissed as relics or reduced to their most superficial feature, which is that entry is not easy.Devotees Ask Modi—Why Kill Cockroaches AND (Not IN) Delhi Gymkhana?Let us be honest about what is meant when people reach for the word "elitism" in connection with these spaces. Every institution of consequence is, in some sense, exclusive. Parliament, the judiciary, premier universities, the upper floors of any major corporation—none of them are without their hierarchies and their gatekeeping. The question worth asking is never whether a threshold exists. It is what happens once you are past it. And what happens inside the Delhi Gymkhana, the Delhi Golf Club, the Bombay Gymkhana, and the network of clubs that extends across every major Indian city is considerably more interesting than the conversation about who belongs there.These clubs are, in practice, among the few spaces in Indian public life where a retired civil servant, a sitting industrialist, a young policy researcher, a journalist of 40 years' standing, and a recently elected representative might share the same informal hour without any of them being on the record.That condition, the removal of the record, is not a loophole. It is a feature. It is where positions soften, where the adversarial posture of the committee room gives way to something more like genuine exchange.A golf round is four hours of enforced proximity with nowhere to retreat. You share the small indignities of a missed shot. You share silences.By the time you reach what golfers call the nineteenth, you have often covered more ground than a formal meeting would permit.I grew up inside these spaces. I learnt to swim at the Delhi Gymkhana. I played my early golf at the Delhi Golf Club, where the fairways run alongside Mughal tombs in an arrangement that is somehow entirely natural and entirely Indian. After school in Colaba, I ate at the Bombay Gymkhana surrounded by adults deep in conversations they had clearly been having for years. What struck me then, and what has only become clearer with time, was not the grandeur of the surroundings. It was the sheer biodiversity of thought. The range of opinion, experience, and argument that circulated through those rooms was unlike anything available in a more structured setting. Armchair intellectualism, a phrase often deployed as dismissal, was there operating at its most productive, which is to say at its most honest.These institutions also carry a continuity of memory that is genuinely rare. The replica of the Constitution of India is preserved in the library of the Delhi Gymkhana. That is not a decorative fact. It speaks to something about what these clubs have always understood themselves to be, not merely social venues but custodians of a certain civic seriousness. They began, yes, as colonial emblems. Their founding histories are entangled with an era India has rightly moved beyond. But India has always had the capacity to inherit a space and make it unrecognisably its own. What these clubs are today, centres of intergenerational dialogue, of policy conversation, of the kind of relationship building that formal institutions cannot manufacture, is a thoroughly Indian achievement.The intergenerational dimension deserves particular attention. Institutional memory in India is fragile. It tends to live in people rather than in records, and it tends to die with them unless it is passed on in exactly the kind of casual, repeated, unhurried interaction that a club makes possible.To sit with someone 40 years your senior and hear not their official account of events but their actual account is an education that no archive provides.As India's presence on the world stage deepens, as we speak with increasing seriousness about soft power and the projection of ideas rather than simply interests, club diplomacy deserves to enter the vocabulary. Not as a euphemism for anything, but as an honest acknowledgment that some of the most durable influence in any society flows through its informal architecture. Name it, and you begin to understand it. Understand it, and you begin to use it well.[Atharv Mankotia is a third-generation member of the Delhi Gymkhana Club and a second-generation member of the Delhi Golf Club. He swims like he is fighting for his life, and his golf is a matter best left unexamined. His father won the snooker tournament of Gymkhana Club last year. His grandfather, Group Captain VC Mankotia, served as the Delhi Gymkhana Club’s Secretary for four years (1977-79 and 1982-84). His grandmother planted the tree rows along the pathway from Kashmir lawns to the swimming pool that still stand. His parents held their wedding reception at the Rose Garden which had been given a fresh lease of life during his grandfather’s tenure. All the books authored by his parents sit in the club library. A Mankotia visits the Club for ideas, chicken sandwiches, and occasionally the Thursday Nights. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.]

BECOME A MEMBER

Delhi Gymkhana Club and the Quiet Power of 'Club Diplomacy'

What these clubs are today, centres of intergenerational dialogue, is a thoroughly Indian achievement.

Read Latest News and Breaking News at The Quint, browse for more from opinion

Topics: New Delhi elite