THE Delhi Gymkhana hasn’t shut its doors yet, but the obituaries are already being circulated, mostly on WhatsApp. Black armbands haven’t been formalised, but let’s give it another week. The order is likely already with the tailor.
The club, founded in 1913, when the British still presumed permanence, supplied three essentials to the elite: privacy, continuity and properly served Scotch. The lease, a paltry Rs 1,000 a year, survived Independence, new governing bodies and the city’s many reinventions through bureaucratic inertia. Nobody looked closely until someone finally did.
Amusingly, security concerns have been advanced as the civil explanation. This is fittingly ironic too. The club was long the capital’s most comfortable neutral ground, where diplomats of convenient allegiance, officers of vague repute and civil servants whose titles shifted with the seasons drifted across the lawns with studied casualness. The chicken sandwiches, by most accounts, retained their customary Edwardian restraint.
Now, the same 27 acres are suddenly a potential risk. But the story is not primarily about fences. It is about the intentional redrawing of the city’s cultural map. At the centre of this remapping sits Jim Khanna, the club’s most faithful inhabitant and its unofficial archivist of privilege. Jim keeps a mental ledger of every handshake, each table’s history and suitable anecdotes for every occasion. To him, membership was never merely a pass; it was an inherited posture, a civic accent worn with the ease of long habit.
The current ruling dispensation’s project, however, is less about Jim Khanna’s nostalgia and more about a competing aesthetic for public life, an ideology that prefers visible renewal to imperceptible continuity. Public spaces and institutions are being designed to reflect a different set of priorities where ossified habits of discretionary decision-making can no longer escape scrutiny. In practice, this often looks less like erasure than a rearrangement, as is apparent in monuments dusted, languages elevated, civic rituals repackaged, and in one small but telling swap, long-table lunches replaced by the plain efficiency of paneer pakoras.
Meanwhile, those who never received a call, waiting for the selection process that crawled at a glacial pace, are full of gleeful schadenfreude. For them, there is now an almost festive satisfaction. They spent years on the waiting list, often told that the committee’s slow deliberations were some kind of high-minded selection. They are savouring the moment when the elites discover that a thousand-rupee lease and a fat membership ledger were never an impenetrable shield.
History tells us that Delhi remakes itself constantly through avenues, apartment blocks and the narratives it chooses to privilege. The club that outlived an empire may not outlast the cultural reordering done in its name. When it finally closes, it will go as it lived — with the last round ordered, Jim Khanna woefully polishing his memories and nobody quite willing to call for the bill. Outside, a stall sells chicken sandwiches under a banner promising “heritage with a modern twist.” People aren’t sure whether to feel hungry or affronted.
The writer is former Professor and Fellow, Panjab University
