In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre makes a trenchant observation which is very apposite to the controversy around the decision of the government to take over the property leased out to the Delhi Gymkhana Club. “The European elite,” he says, “undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western culture... After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers.”
When it came to branding their slaves, no one has done it better than the British. They seem to have inscribed the colonial codes into the very genes of the colonised in a manner that the branding has far outlived their dominance and subjugation. Colonialism achieves its ultimate triumph not merely when the colonised obey the master, but when they begin instinctively to reproduce the cultural predilections, social reflexes and institutional forms for which they had originally been designed. The irony of the situation should not be lost on anyone: the issue of dispensing with a colonial relic is being conducted in the words given to us by our masters.
Conscious of this legacy, most of us Indians make conscious efforts to disremember our colonial past, not merely its violence but its lasting effect in altering our perception of ourselves, eroding our self-belief and depriving our self-assurance that should naturally belong to an independent nation conscious of an illustrious past. But there also remains a section for whom the word colonial is invariably yoked with charm and nostalgia.
Gymkhana Clubs and such other enclaves of exclusivity ensured segregation and seclusion which were necessary to create a mystique of British racial superiority and an aura of untouchable authority. The natives were meant to encounter the ruler only in formal settings, courtrooms, military parades, offices and ceremonies, never relaxed, ordinary or familiar surroundings. Familiarity breeds contempt.
Even when select members of the native elite were eventually admitted, after they had diligently mastered the dress codes, table manners, ballroom etiquette, billiards and the manners of the ruling race, equality did not follow. Admission did not abolish hierarchy; it merely created graded assimilation. For quite some time, the Indian members of the ICS were made to sit on the lawns while the white sat inside. Those who readily sloughed off their cultural skins and sought to impersonate the white race were never quite allowed to forget that they were impersonators, poor copies, after all.
The masters departed in 1947. With them disappeared, or should have disappeared, the very raison d’être for the elaborate trappings of imperial aloofness. But the local elite just stepped into the shoes of the departed masters and gladly retained the institutions and, in many cases, the outlook as well. The sense of being orphaned voiced by the crème de la crème – officers of the IAS and IPS, retired army generals, judges, diplomats and renowned media personalities – at the mere thought of the proposed takeover of the Delhi Gymkhana is therefore not entirely unintelligible. They may well be able to make us understand their pain and anguish. What they perhaps cannot make us understand is why we should share it. Their brothers are mystified over their misery: after all, it is only access to a bit of real estate.
This reminds me of Benjy, the idiot child in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. His carer Caddy is gone. Benjy, instinctively, recognised love and tenderness though he could not have named them. He only knew that something was wrong, that a vacuum had opened within him. He found reassurance and solace by clutching on to Caddy’s slippers.
There is of course merit in the fact that the Gymkhana is not the only preserve of privilege in India; it is not. There is justice in asking why other entrenched privileges continue undisturbed. That merely places an onus on the government to dismantle other such enclaves of privilege and patronage; it does not invalidate the move to begin with the Gymkhana Club. Delhi Gymkhana is indeed a heritage property, but heritage status protects buildings; it does not, by itself, decide who gets to enjoy them.
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