Why Club Cuisine Will Always Have a Place in Indian Culture
Club-cuisine is a genre of its own, and has a complicated place in history. Sneha Mehta and Mallika Chandra explore the club-culture of Bombay and the culinary delights they have produced.
Colonial-era sports clubs in Bombay were created for the triad of the Anglo-Indian idea of leisure for the privileged—food, sport and socialising. Modelled on famous gentleman’s clubs in London, like White’s and the Athenaeum Club, these carefully landscaped spaces, like The Royal Willingdon Sports Club in Tardeo, the Bombay Gymkhana in Fort and The Breach Candy Swimming Bath and Trust in — no prizes for guessing —Breach Candy, have now been inherited by a new set of members: India’s monied class, its post-colonial nobility.
The food served at these establishments is a perfect distillation of the tug-of-war that continues to take place between staunchly independent Indian-ness and quaint, forgotten British-ness. Clubs were once considered the last bastion of hoity-toity Victorian eating, markedly separate from the local snacks served by street vendors outside its walls, but they have now embraced an everywhere-but-nowhere approach to menus. Welsh rarebit nestles against Chicken Manchurian, akuri eggs clash with Waldorf salads, chaat and club sandwiches compete. While some mourn the loss of the perceived charm of colonial eating, this inclusivity represents the shifting preferences of a modern, independent and Indian population.
Why should we turn our attention to these exclusive spaces, which the majority of people cannot even peek into? Because a chapter in the story of post-colonial Bombay can be told through this hotchpotch of foods. Club fare is a cuisine in its own right, albeit one without a geographical origin or formal history. The food, the social practices and the spaces designed around its consumption are a representation of the struggle embedded in a city once named Bombay, but now called Mumbai.
Through this essay and photographs, we attempt to honour the influence of the past on the reality of today, without sentimentalising spaces of exclusion and colonial oppression. It is an effort to give form to the culture that has emerged around eating at clubs, and shed light on the the beliefs of a people and the way they eat, through descriptive vignettes and observations.
In a city starved of public spaces, the few with club memberships are blessed. Clubs serve as excellent sports facilities, with year-round coaching, club teams and competitive events. Every summer, the pools are filled with toddlers in colourful floats getting their first swim lessons. The restaurants and bars are used for birthday parties, Sunday breakfasts and as a fallback on weekdays, when the cook doesn’t show up. For the older members, the bridge rooms, libraries and verandahs are the nuclei of their social lives in retirement, giving them a sense of routine. Somehow, all of these events centre around eating and drinking.
Of all the days of the week, Sunday at the club is an institution: a day of leisure, good food and family time. It is a day that inspires a longing for tradition, to perform in the way generations before did. And on Sundays, many generations of members move through the clubs, performing their weekly rituals.
At the Royal Willingdon Sports Club, the tree-fringed swimming pool opens at 6.30 am. Which means that shortly after, the club’s little food court is bustling with children, fresh out of the pool and dripping water on the stackable plastic chairs they are seated on, made by India’s favourite manufacturer, Nilkamal. The food court is the only area where such indecorous behaviour is allowed, making it the perfect spot for messy, post-swim feasts consisting of crispy dosas dipped into piping hot sambar, white-bread sandwiches slathered with Amul butter, and tall chocolate milkshakes.
Around 11 pm, once the kids have been carted home and the clamour has died down, the club transforms into a languid place for the retired members, who have probably seen their parents and grandparents age in the libraries and card rooms and are content to do exactly the same.
“I play bridge at the Willingdon Club three or four times a week,” said Minal Marfatia, 65, who has been a member for over twenty years. “I like the food and the ambience, but the best part is being able to play with my group of friends.”
At the Bombay Gymkhana, one can see old men dotted across the verandah, reading the newspaper, or merely gazing out at the maidan, a pot of chai and some Britannia Marie biscuits tucked away near their elbows.
This lull doesn’t last long, because at lunchtime, groups of women gather in their pearls and pastel coloured dresses, looking right at home against the delicate floral upholstery patterns of the couches. They gossip about their children, complain about their servants and swap recipes for the perfect undhiyo. At the Breach Candy Club, the mini cocktail naans stuffed with cheese are a crowd-pleaser, the contemporary Indian-version of finger foods. It is such a relaxed gathering that when ice-cream is mentioned, everyone is ready to indulge, promising that from tomorrow they will be better with their diets. The Bombay Gym’s dark chocolate praline ice-cream is a favourite, served in stainless steel goblets dripping with condensation in the hot Bombay weather. When it is late afternoon and time to go home and nap, drivers are summoned to the front gates and fond good-byes are said.
Teatime is a requisite in the daily lives of most Indians, and in the clubs, it is elevated to a dignified institution. “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not — some people of course never do — the situation is in itself delightful,” wrote novelist Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady. At the Willingdon Club, this ceremony is accompanied by a tinkle of bells, bells used to summon waiters to order chilli cheese toast and french fries with masala chai. At the Cricket Club of India, the Brabourne Stadium cricket pitch converts into an alfresco restaurant. The field is strewn with clusters of people — old friends, families and teenagers — eating dahi puri and sev puri, and sipping out of nariyals that come precariously balanced in dainty wicker baskets, under pink-hued Bombay sunsets.
But at nightfall, the clubs take on a more mischievous air. The purpose of clubs has always been to promote sport and social mingling between men of a certain social rank, making post-practice drinking the building block of lifelong friendships. During the Raj, this bonding took place over chota pegs of watery whiskey sodas, gimlets of John Collins, a whiskey-based drink which is believed to have been invented by an American at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club after a game of tennis. But at the Bombay Gym, the rugby team swaps the polite gimlets of the Raj with sensible bottles of Kingfisher beer, albeit the premium kind.
“Post practice meals at the bar is less of a ritual, and more of a habit,” said Tushaar Carvalho, a member of the Bombay Gymkhana rugby team since 2010. “The cuisine depends on the mood we’re in, and luckily the gymkhanas are pretty versatile in that sense.”
Beer is the perfect accompaniment to the bowls of chakna and the Indo-Chino-Mughlai mixture of dishes they order after practice: juicy chicken kebabs and naans dripping with butter, bright orange chilli chicken garnished with crunchy onions and pots of mutton biryani. The only constant? “We’re all Limca fiends,” says Carvalho, of the team’s penchant for the lemony fizzy drink.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. But in Bombay’s clubs, contrary to Hartley’s declaration, the dichotomy between past-present, foreign-local is as blurry as the origins of many of the foods and rituals found in them. Club menus are living fossils, simultaneously ancient and contemporary. And the Sunday routines that have grown around them, quite universal though they might be, aren’t fascinating in and of themselves. It is the changes in the food, in the city and even in the members that have been taking place unnoticed as they seemingly do the same things, week after week, decade after decade that deserves attention. Here lies the triumph of club food as a cultural marker, disjointed and confused though its authenticity may be: it doesn’t attempt to dazzle people with innovations, but for centuries has continued to do the unglamorous work of giving them exactly what they need.
Sneha is a Bombay-based writer and designer interested in telling stories about how the objects we surround ourselves with shape culture, identity, and our lives.
Mallika is a Bombay-based designer, maker and photographer from Bombay. Her work often explores the influence of food, the aesthetics of 'fun', and the extraordinariness of everyday objects.
This essay is part of a research project for an exhibition in New York, titled Wicket Leeks; to observe colonialism and new forms of imperialism through the lens of food and sport. 'Play Fare: Culinary Leftovers from the Raj, The Evolution of Club Cuisine and Contemporary Eating in Bombay’s Colonial-era Clubs looks at the hodgepodge of dishes and practices created by independent citizens in spaces that once stood for exclusion. You can see more of their work here.