April 13, 1998

With the city's corporate profile shrinking, its ex-British clubs are less fussy about blackballing.

By Udayan Namboodiri

Eighty years ago, the ladies of British Calcutta picketed the wrought-iron gates of the Bengal Club to collect funds for the welfare of General Dyer -- notorious for the Jallianwala Bagh killings. For years after Independence, Indians were not allowed in the pool of the Calcutta Swimming Club; it changed its constitution as late as 1988 to allow more Indians into its committee. The 157-year-old Tollygunje Club was for most of its life the week-end bastion of British managers in tea estates and jute mills, and was run by an all-British governing committee.

Long after the Union Jack had come down, the half a dozen colonial clubs of Calcutta struggled with falling revenues to hold aloft the banner of exclusivity -- the only change being that the white sahibs were replaced by their brown successors. However, the rapid contraction of Calcutta in the corporate map of India and the consequent disappearance of high-spending members have now made these clubs look for subsistence through means that are not quite classy. Such as dependence on the munificence of tobacco and liquor companies, who have restrictions on advertising anyway, and throwing open membership to the hoi polloi. The clubs that still resist change in outlook have their bottom-lines under attack. Those open to change are becoming déclassé.

Tollygunje Club, the favourite of Calcutta's remaining boxwallahs, now has the 213-year-old club house getting a Rs 14-lakh facelift -- courtesy tobacco giant ITC. But Tolly is by far the most booming of the colonial cousins because of a Rs 4 crore-compensation against land surrendered for the construction of the metro railway in the '70s. That was well invested in an 80-room residence which makes its economies vastly different from its sisters. But, across the city, some of Tolly's sisters are gradually coming under the gloom of recession. "Margins are under squeeze, bottom lines under pressure," says Khokon Mookerji, convener of the Forum of Club Presidents.

Most clubs are finding tradition a bit too expensive to maintain at the acceptable tariff-level, which is uniformly low. A four-course Chinese dinner with a couple of rounds of good whiskey at the Calcutta Club works out to less than Rs 500. Bar rates are ridiculous. At the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club (CCFC), the oldest of the pack (started in 1792), a peg of Scotch is just Rs 80. "That comes combined with personalised service and an ambience that's impossible at any good restaurant," says sportscaster Kishore Bhimani, a luminary of the club. A month's riding lessons at Tolly costs the member Rs 600 and a game of tennis just Rs 3.50 at the Saturday Club. At the 170-year-old Royal Calcutta Golf Club, which recently hosted the $300,000 (Rs 1.2 crore) Wills Open Golf, an 18-hole game can be played for less than Rs 50, caddie and all. The monthly subscription for the 107-year-old Calcutta Swimming Club is as low as Rs 100.

"We avoid passing on costs to our members," says Mike Robertson, Tolly's managing member. The hard truth is that Calcutta -- after the closure of Dunlop, the attempted move-out of Shaw Wallace and the streamlining at Bata, till recently a big spender on clubs -- is left without many corporates who could back executives with fat expense accounts. Some clubs are becoming less choosy about membership profile and source of donation and are giving a go-by to the traditional leisurely method of collecting payments. At the Calcutta Swimming Club, old-timers find a sea change in the present culture of members being charged cash and the membership rolls constantly expanding. At the 123-year-old Saturday Club, there is now a Wills lounge and a Uniworth club room fitted out with imported wood panels. The Bengal Club, still at the top of the heap, has maintained its high profile by charging members cost plus rates on food and drinks. But the trade-off lies in lowering the entry barrier to executives of faceless companies. Old Bengal Club hands reminisce how executives below a certain rank were invariably blackballed till a decade ago. Now, the threshold is flexible. Besides, there is little check on the reputation of the employer company, or its position in the corporate pecking order.

With the club committees constantly under pressure not to raise fees or charges, the clubs tend to lose in the bargain either their financial soundness or their character, the latter often being rooted in history. The Calcutta Club, for example, was a rebuff by the Bengali elite to the no-Indians policy of the colonial clubs. The club has retained its bhadralok (gentle folk) identity, discouraging the arriviste crowd from becoming members and generally being patronised by second- or third-generation Bengali entrepreneurs. But that's a vanishing tribe; besides, circumstances have made the hereditary members stingier than their ancestors. The greying members often spend an evening nursing a small pink gin. Dipak Datta, a finance professional who now heads the club committee, wonders how long the club can provide "new-world services" at "old-world prices". With rising expectations of members (air conditioners in place of ceiling fans), and stagnant revenues, most clubs are rushing to industrialist-patrons at the year-end with deficits to close, or to clamour for direct corporate sponsorship.

The clubs still attract a sizeable chunk of the basket of corporates' brand-promotion spends. Says Dickoo Nowroji, marketing manager, ITC, "We support the clubs partly out of a social responsibility, but we are also sure of maximum mileage as we get the elite crowd in one place." But there is a limit to corporate funding in a city that has failed to attract new businesses and an inflow of high-rolling executives. The way out of the time warp is to live down the uppity past, and to let in the parvenu and the fragrance of Paan Bahar.

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