Just in jest clubbing us into submission

Just in jest clubbing us into submission

How our babus faithfully carry on a British Raj tradition.
India's top babus could not disagree more with Groucho Marx, who remarked that he would never join a club which would have him as a member.
In a reported move that might prompt the suggestion that the IAS stands not for the Indian Administrative Service but the Indirect Arm-twisting Service, top bureaucrats in Mumbai have muscled their way into getting life membership for themselves in one of the city's premiere social establishments, a cachet they had apparently long aspired to.
They finally got what they wanted, purportedly by using a stratagem based on the principle that if you can't join 'em, lick 'em. Babudom licked the establishment in question into acquiescence by denying it a licence to serve alcoholic beverages for its New Year's Eve celebration, thus turning the event into a damp squib.
Taking into account the fact that the higher echelons of Indian bureaucracy already constitute what might be described as an exclusive club for a privileged elite, some might wonder why the Mumbai mandarins went to such lengths ¬ or should that be depths? to gatecrash yet another such institution.
But to borrow Samuel Johnson's descriptive tag, it would seem that they are very `clubbable' chaps, who believe in the precept of the more the merrier when it comes to acquiring status symbols like gaining rights of admission to such snooty enclaves: Club culture was introduced into India by the British.
Managing an empire ¬ of which India was supposedly the `Jewel in the Crown' ¬ was a taxing business, in more ways than one, and the burra sahebs who ran the show needed a place where they could unwind and relax their stiff upper lips, protected from prying eyes by signs at the entrance which said `Indians and dogs not allowed'.
When the British departed, the gora sahebs were replaced by the no-less-burra brown sahebs who took over the proprietary rights of clubdom, zealously maintaining the koi-hai traditions laid down by the erstwhile rulers.
In what was then Calcutta, a sports club would host special fish-and-chips nights, when that British specialty would be served in the traditional way by being wrapped in a newspaper ¬ which had to be The Times, London, and not a local rag.
Many chhota pegs have flowed down the hatch of history since then, but clubmanship in its many manifestations continues to be seen as the prized preserve of both the high and mighty as well as the hoity-toity.
Indeed, as the recent charge of the babu brigade in Mumbai suggests, the word club has more than one meaning. Those who rule us, now as then, can take up cudgels on their own behalf and, in all senses of that term, club us into submission.