The Last Bourbon At Gymkhana Club

The Delhi Gymkhana Club, 27.3 acres of mahogany-panelled, tennis-courted, gin-and-tonic-scented real estate in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi, a short stroll from the most consequential address in the republic, received a notice from the Government of India informing it that it had until June 5 to vacate the premises. The stated reason was “strengthening and securing defence infrastructure”. The club, at an emergency meeting (one that I imagine contained more existential anxiety than the usual Thursday evening bridge game), declared it would go to court.

And so began the final act of one of Delhi's great institutional romances: the century-long love affair between the republic's power elite and the building in which they socialised while nominally running the country they officially served. It was, the sort of arrangement that could only be described as an open secret, except the secret was open to everyone; except the people paying the landlord's ₹1,000 annual rent. Which is to say, everyone in India who was not a member.

Understanding the Chronology

The story begins, as most Indian institutional stories of dubious democratic pedigree begin, with a Durbar. In 1911, King George V arrived in Delhi, possessing the combined confidence of a man who owned a fifth of the world's landmass and the ambition of someone who had never personally moved house. He announced, to the considerable astonishment of Calcutta, that the capital of British India would relocate to Delhi. Calcutta, which had spent decades accumulating the infrastructure of empire, its courts, its commerce, its Clubs — absorbed this news with the dignified resentment that only truly civilised cities can muster. (As a tempered Bengali, working with another Senior Bengali who, in turn is maxed out on various parameters of the Bengaliness index, I can personally attest that it is still absorbing the news with unabated resentment.)

Delhi, meanwhile, began the project of becoming a capital. In the British imagination, this would mean, above all, building somewhere for officers to eat and play tennis without the awkwardness of interacting with the people they would govern. Two years later, on July 3, 1913, the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club was founded. Initially at the Coronation Grounds, it eventually settled at its present address on Safdarjung Road, occupying 27.3 acres designed by Robert Tor Russell, the British architect also responsible for Connaught Place and Teen Murti House, buildings which the Indian Republic would later inherit without any particular legal proceeding.

The word 'gymkhana' derives from the Hindi 'gend-khana,' meaning ball-house. The British empire adopted, Anglicised, and applied to the network of multi-sport social clubs that functioned as the soft architecture of colonialism across the subcontinent. Not the hard architecture of forts and cantonment walls, you understand, but the architecture of who may enter and who may not, of who belongs and who is merely tolerated. G.K. Chesterton, writing in a different context but with his usual precision, observed in his 1908 spiritual autobiography Orthodoxy, that tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes: the dead. The Gymkhana, by this standard, was less a club than an ongoing referendum in which the unalive retained a permanent majority.

Its first president was Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler, a prominent British administrator later appointed the first Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. Among the club's early financial backers were Indian royals who funded the institution; an arrangement of almost literary irony, princes of a subjugated nation underwriting the leisure of their subjugators, presumably on the theory that proximity to power (even borrowed power) was better than none. Students of subcontinental politics will recognise this as a strategy that has aged remarkably well.

In 1928, the club was formally allotted those 27.3 acres on a perpetual lease. The annual rent was fixed at ₹1,000 (estimated 2 to 2.5 Lakhs INR presently, when adjusted for inflation, though figures vary marginally, at either end). Even by the standards of 1928, this was not a munificent contribution to the public exchequer. In 2026, it is the approximate cost of a moderately decent bottle of whisky (perhaps even a single malt) at the club's own bar, which is itself a form of poetry, if the form in question is contretemps.

On August 15, 1947, India became free. The club dropped “Imperial” from its name. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became its new Vice-Patron. This, in its entirety, was the extent of decolonisation of 2, Safdarjung Road.

The ₹1,000 rent, the perpetual lease, the mahogany have remained. The dress codes, the waiting lists, the PUB 1913, (named with a spectacular lack of self-consciousness for the year of the club's imperial founding), have also remained. If I had my druthers and was permitted a smidgen of levity, I would certainly venture to rechristen PUB 1913 as PUB-G. Some jokes just tend to write themselves.

What changed, was the colour of the faces in the dining room, and even this happened gradually and selectively, a managed transition from one elite to another, the colonial officer replaced by the Indian bureaucrat with the same taste for tradition and a newer set of grievances.

Nehru himself was a man of Harrow and Cambridge, whose socialism was Fabian and constitutional but whose passions and aesthetics were unmistakably aristocratic. That he should become Vice-Patron of the Gymkhana was a fitting expression of his sensibility. He understood, as the founders of most postcolonial states understand, that the machinery of governance runs on precedent, and that precedent tends to favour buildings with high ceilings.

What would Mr. Pierre Bourdieu say?

Elite classes maintain dominance not merely through economic capital but through cultural capital. This would encompass an accumulated habitus of taste, association, and institutional belonging that is invisible to those who have it and impenetrable to those who do not. The Gymkhana was a place beyond recreation, lunch and high tea. It was a place where the people who decided things about India met the other people who decided things about India, in surroundings that tacitly signalled that they all belonged to the same conversation and that conversation did not require minutes.

For over seven decades, successive governments: Congress governments, Janata governments, coalition governments of bewildering and brief variety, and eventually BJP governments, looked at those 27.3 acres in the heart of the capital and unanimously reached the conclusion without recorded debate, that this was fine. The state owned the land. The club used the land. The rent was nominal. The members were the government. The arrangement persisted with the tautology/self-evidentiary nature of an Ouroboros.

The Twilight Zone

The Delhi Gymkhana Club rested, legally, on ground almost as precarious as its moral position. The land, owned by the President of India, administered by the Land and Development Office was held by the club on a leasehold rather than freehold basis. In Lutyens' Delhi, this is standard. The whole zone is, in a sense, one enormous constitutional anomaly in which the President owns everything and institutions occupy it on terms set by lease deeds that no one read carefully until they became prickly.

The original 1928 lease deed contained, buried somewhere in its colonial legalese, a Clause 4: a re-entry provision entitling the government to resume possession of the land for public purposes. For ninety-eight years, nobody invoked it. Clause 4 sat in the original deed like a loaded revolver on a country house mantelpiece in a Martin Scorsese film: present, acknowledged, entirely ignored, and suddenly, devastatingly relevant.

As a Section 8 company under the Companies Act 2013, Gymkhana falls under a category reserved for non-profits incorporated for purposes of public utility. The club is also subject to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. This was, in retrospect, either the most significant administrative oversight in the club's history or the most significant in the Ministry's, depending on one's perspective. A club whose membership included the very people who drafted company law, was incorporated under company law in a way that made it accountable to the government those members ran.

In April 2020, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs approached the National Company Law Tribunal under Sections 241 and 242 of the Companies Act, 2013, seeking relief on the grounds that the club's affairs were being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest. This is the legal provision designed for companies in crisis, and the NCLT found, in April 2022, sufficient grounds to permit the government to nominate fifteen directors to the club's general committee. The irony in this, keeps on giving and requires no underlining: an institution built by imperialists to exclude the public was found to be in violation of its own charter, as an institution serving the public.

What had the club actually done wrong? The short answer is: the usual things. Provident fund compliance had not been maintained. EPF exemptions had been withdrawn. Internal elections had been conducted with all the procedural rigour of a school prefect contest between cousins. The people who wrote India's employment laws, corporate governance framework and adjudicated public interest, found their club in breach of the very same laws, and appeared to be acting contrary to public interest.

The NCLAT upheld the government's intervention in October 2024, observing that there was sufficient material to form an opinion that the affairs of the company were being conducted in a manner prejudicial to the public interest. It set a deadline of March 31, 2025, for remedial measures and elections. And then, in May 2026, the government invoked Clause 4, apparently deciding that remediation was insufficient and that a more permanent solution was in order.

Tenability of Reclamation

The Land and Development Office's notice of May 22, 2026 states, that the 27.3 acres are required for “strengthening and securing defence infrastructure” and “vital public security purposes” in a strategically sensitive zone.

Now. The Gymkhana is genuinely proximate to sensitive locations. Safdarjung Road sits near the Prime Minister's residence, South Block, the Vice-President's house, and various establishments that appear on no tourist maps. This much is true and verifiable. What strains credulity, only slightly, is the suggestion that this proximity has become a pressing concern in the specific week of May 22, 2026, given that it was equally true in May 1926, in May 1947, in May 1984, and in every May between. The geography of Lutyens' Delhi has not materially altered. It wouldn't be wild to suggest that the real change, is perhaps the government's patience with the arrangement.

Senior Advocate Mr. Kapil Sibal, appearing for club members in the Delhi High Court argued that the Centre's reliance on Clause 4 raised serious constitutional concerns and that even with powers over the land, the government could not bypass procedural safeguards. The club's representatives noted that the justification was vague, lacked particulars, and amounted to an arbitrary attempt to take control without compensation or proper acquisition proceedings.

This is a substantive legal argument. The Land Acquisition Act 2013, requires, for acquisition of land for public purposes, notices, hearings, and compensation. The government's invocation of the lease's re-entry clause circumvents acquisition entirely on the theory that the land was never truly transferred and therefore cannot be acquired, only resumed.

This is, as legal arguments go, defensible. It is also what I would call a glass half full. The position is technically accurate and considerably more comfortable for the person making the argument than for the person receiving it. The Solicitor General, Mr. Tushar Mehta assured the Delhi High Court that there would be no forcible or coercive takeover.

The most honest account of what is happening resists a single clean explanation. The NCLAT proceedings gave the government its legal footing, but legal footing alone does not explain the timing. Thirty acres in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi, held at a rent that wouldn't cover a round of drinks at the bar it notionally subsidises, has its own logic. The defence rationale provided a procedural door through which all of this could walk. And somewhere underneath the legal architecture sits something harder to name in a court filing: a democratic impatience, decades in the accumulation leading to the spectacle of the well-connected occupying republic land as though occupation were a form of inheritance. Governments, like novelists, rarely act for a single reason. The reasons they state publicly are not always the reasons they act.

One must refuse, and firmly, the temptation to reduce this story to a morality play in which the perceived villains finally meet their democratic reckoning. The membership of the Delhi Gymkhana Club is not a cabal. It is something more interesting and considerably more poignant. It is a cross-section of the Indian state's own self-image, which is to say, it is the Indian state looking at itself in a mahogany-framed mirror and finding the reflection, on the whole, rather distinguished.

Many members are retired civil servants and military officers. People who spent their careers at government salaries that were, by any honest regard, not commensurate with either the power they exercised or the sacrifice they made in exercising it. For them, the Gymkhana was a deferred benefit, an acknowledgement in marble and lawn of the decades spent in service. The waiting list is notoriously long, the membership fee is not trivial, and the expectation can be said to be that the institution would outlast them.

This is worth sitting with. Orwell, in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a social commentary on the English class system, observed that the lower-upper-middle class (the professional cadre whose income was modest but whose status was immense), lived in a permanent condition of genteel anxiety, maintaining the appearances of a class they could barely afford. The Indian equivalent, the senior IAS officer or retired general, lived with a related anxiety: that the institutional recognition of their service would not survive the government that had conferred it. The Gymkhana was, among other things, an insurance policy against irrelevance.

Never-Never Land

And yet, there is the small matter of the large piece of land.

Twenty-seven acres. In the centre of a city where a two-bedroom flat in a moderately desirable postcode costs a sum that would take the average Indian household several lifetimes to accumulate. Leased at ₹1,000 a year to an institution accessible to, at any given moment, perhaps fifteen thousand people out of a nation of one billion four hundred million.

During undergrad years, while chomping on vada pao near Fort and VT, Mumbai, I chanced upon these decrepit flea shops that used to sell vinyl records and books by the kilo. It was here that I picked up older editions of Jhabvala (Dukkis/Guidebooks) that were sold off by the graduating Government Law College cohort, and among other texts, got introduced to the work of John Rawls. While legal theory still remains elusive to me, one memorable lesson that always remained was his famous thought experiment, called the “veil of ignorance”. Rawls asked us to imagine designing institutions from behind a veil of ignorance. It is a point of view, where, as a proverbial creator we don't know our place in society, our class, our wealth, our connections. Examined from behind that veil, the Gymkhana lease does not survive first principles. It does not even survive first questions.

The paradox at the heart of the club's membership is that many of its members - people of genuine intelligence, people who are well-read, and considerably self-aware, know this perfectly well. They are not unacquainted with Rawls. Several of them have taught Rawls. What they have also done as while being part of the intelligentsia, is maintained a conceptual separation between their personal comfort and their theoretical commitments that would make a lesser philosopher's head spin. We laugh at them. We should. But we should laugh with the sub-conscious recognition that we would, in their position, almost certainly do the same. The Gymkhana did not survive for a century because its members were unusually hypocritical. It survived because institutions that serve the powerful tend to continue serving the powerful until the powerful change. The remarkable thing is that someone has finally decided to pull the plug and reset The Matrix.

Unanswered Questions

There is a dimension of this controversy that is conspicuously absent from the reported legal proceedings, the television debates, and the social media outrage cycle. The Delhi Gymkhana Club is, by any reasonable architectural assessment, a historically significant building. Robert Tor Russell designed it in the early twentieth century as part of the same imperial urban project that produced Connaught Place and the wider Lutyens' Delhi ensemble. The gardens, the proportions, the covered verandahs, the general sense that someone once had both the money and the taste to build something that would last. At the end of the day, Gymkhana is a physical record of a moment in history, whatever one's verdict on that history.

The question of what happens to the building when the government takes possession is ultimately a question about what kind of capital Delhi intends to be. “Defence infrastructure” is not, historically speaking, a phrase associated with heritage sensitivity. The conversion of historically significant buildings into security-adjacent facilities has, across the world, a fairly consistent outcome: more CCTVs, fewer bougainvilleas, and a general atmosphere of purposeful utility that tends to age rather badly. The Archaeological Survey of India, the National Monuments Authority, and the Delhi High Court all have at least theoretical jurisdiction over aspects of heritage protection. Whether any of them will exercise it is another matter. The case for preservation is certainly strongest in the mouths of people making the most self-interested arguments. When a retired IAS officer says the Gymkhana should be preserved, he means he should still be permitted to lunch there. When a heritage architect says it, she means the building. These are not the same argument, though they are invariably delivered in the same breath and with the same expression of principled concern.

Untangling the Impasse

The Delhi High Court has issued summons on civil suits filed by club members. The Solicitor General has assured the bench that the government will proceed strictly under the legal framework. There has been no interim order or stay, which is a source of uncertainty for everyone involved.

The legal battle has at least three distinct fronts, each with its own pleasure and its own peril. First: was Clause 4 was validly invoked? Is “defence necessity” sufficiently specific and genuine to sustain a lease termination, or is it a vague and arbitrary invocation of broad powers. Second: Whether the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act 1971 provides the government its mechanism, or does any other acquisition process with its procedural protections, hearings, and compensation requirements ought to apply. Third: The constitutional question Mr. Sibal has raised under Articles 14 and 300A, whether the summary resumption of a property, without hearing, without compensation, and without specific particulars, violates equality before law and the right to property.

The possible outcomes range from full legal reinstatement, to a rapid possession; and as an alternate third option, a dignified exodus whereby the club's members are given transition time, the building receives heritage protection, and the land is eventually repurposed for something that genuinely serves a public function while preserving the architectural record. This last outcome is the most civilised and therefore, in the present climate, possibly the least likely.

The question that remains is - who inherits the colonial state, on what terms, and for how long?

The founding generation inherited the full apparatus of the Raj. The civil service structures, criminal codes, territorial arrangements, land records, gymkhanas. Some of this inheritance was functional and necessary: you cannot govern a subcontinent without administrative machinery, and you cannot build administrative machinery from scratch while simultaneously running the subcontinent. Some of it was pleasurable, and you cannot blame the men of 1947 for enjoying the buildings they suddenly found themselves in.

The Gymkhana's members, many of them lawyers and former bureaucrats of the first order, understand better than most that the law is not the same as justice, and that a tenable legal argument is not identical to a convincing moral one. The government, for its part, can perhaps consider acknowledging that citing national security for the resumption of a tennis club, with a timing that coincides suspiciously with the conclusion of company law proceedings, tests the credulity of a citizenry. The same common man, who has developed, over several decades of democratic practice, a certain agnosticism about the breadth of the security rationale.

The republic is 78 years old. It has, by now, earned the right to look at its inheritance and decide what to keep and what to return. The Gymkhana case is, whatever its legal outcome, the beginning of that decision. It is overdue.

The Club has survived King George V, Indian independence, Partition, the Emergency, economic liberalisation, three BJP governments, a global pandemic, an NCLAT order, and what appears to be several decades of provident fund non-compliance. It may yet survive this. Courts may go either way. The lawyers are resourceful, and institutions with a century of precedent, a celebrated bar, and a membership drawn from the legal profession itself have considerable gravitational mass.

But something has already ended, regardless of what the Courts eventually decide. The unspoken compact that allowed a colonial leisure club to persist at nominal rent on republic land, unchallenged by the governments whose members staffed it, has been voided. The Clause 4 that sat for ninety-eight years in the original deed like a signed and unexecuted warrant has been invoked. Even if it is struck down by judicial order, everyone in the room now knows it was there. The era in which the Gymkhana's existence was simply not questioned, has closed. The era of litigation, which is what democracy looks like when it finally catches up with itself, has opened.

The members are encountering something the rest of India has known for some time. No institution, however grand, however well-connected, and generously furnished with bureaucrats, lawyers and colonial precedent, is permanently insulated from the democratic arithmetic of a country of 1.4 billion people who were not on the membership list.

The PUB 1913 was named to mark the year of the club's founding. It is now also, inadvertently, a monument to the year from which all this descends. The year a British king announced a new imperial capital, the year some officers needed somewhere to play polo, the year a lease was drawn up that a twenty-first-century democracy is now legally, if not entirely elegantly, unwinding.

The whisky, one is reliably informed, was always excellent. The question was always who was paying for the glass. The answer it turns out, was everyone, who never got to go inside.

(Filed approximately forty-eight hours after the above was written)

The author wishes to clarify, in the interest of full disclosure, that since the composition of the preceding essay, he has been informed by a person whose name he has been advised not to mention that a fast-track membership to the Delhi Gymkhana Club may, in certain circumstances, may be available to individuals who have demonstrated, through published work, a sophisticated understanding of the club's historical and constitutional significance.

The author further wishes to clarify that he is in the early stages of drafting a polemic which he expects will be an equally rigorous, equally well-sourced, and — he cannot stress this enough — entirely independent scholarly reassessment of the case for heritage preservation, the irreplaceable value of Robert Tor Russell's architectural legacy, the overlooked contributions of the private club to India's civil society ecosystem, and the underappreciated public service rendered by institutions that provide senior bureaucrats with a quiet place to decompress after the exertions of governing 1.4 billion people.

He has, in this spirit, already begun preliminary research at PUB 1913, which he can confirm serves an excellent Old Monk and soda, has rather good lighting, and is staffed by people whose discretion is everything one could wish for in an institution of this standing.

The views expressed in the preceding 4,000 words remain, the author insists, entirely his own. The views he expects to express in the forthcoming 4,000 words will also be entirely his own. The fact that these two sets of views are diametrically opposed is not, he believes, a reflection on his intellectual consistency so much as a testament to the genuine complexity of the issue, the importance of hearing all sides, and the remarkable quality of the peanuts that come with the drinks.

He is sorry about the ₹1,000 rent thing. He may have been slightly uncharitable.

The author is, at the time of publication, on the notional guest list. The Gymkhana Club, at the time of writing this Coda, both exists, and does not exist, like Schrödinger's Cat.

— Written near an unspecified location, proximate to 2, Safdarjung Road.