Eric Newby, the English travel writer, recounts that the Kanpur Club refused him and his wife accommodation because he was not a member and could not produce one to propose him. 'We have a letter of introduction from Mr Nehru,' he began but was cut short by the secretary's 'The prime minister is not a member of the Kanpur Club'. The Tanglin Club secretary's phlegm, in asking whether the Japanese officers who peremptorily demanded admission after Singapore surrendered were members, matched that unIndian irreverence. Kipling would have called the two secretaries, one Indian and the other British, brothers under the skin. For all I know, the Kanpur Club may have been reduced now to letting beds to all comers like the Kodaikanal Club. Today's Tanglin is far too self-consciously smart to approve of the graffiti that the Duke of Devonshire found endearing in the Athenaeum telephone room. But social historian Anthony Lejeune's comment that an Oxford college and a gentleman's club are two places where people 'still prefer a silver salt-cellar which doesn't pour to a plastic one which does' would clearly have applied to both institutions when the going was good. Lejeune's parallel between club and Oxford inspired my response when a classics don at Corpus Christi College expressed surprise at my being so much at home in the senior common room. I explained that I had been conditioned by the Bengal Club where, according to John Masters, an honorary wartime member from the American forces peeped into the smoking room after lunch one afternoon and exclaimed, 'Gee! Back home we send them to the mortuary!' It is not, of course, the same Bengal Club that is 175 years old this month. But as Pesi Narielvala, a former president, said at the anniversary dinner on February 1, change is welcome within a framework of continuity. Even Corpus Christi's senior common room gleams with tubular steel and plate glass though the port still circulates against the clock to indicate that the spirit is unbowed despite transformations of the flesh. A sense of proportion is called for in celebrating the birthday of an institution that, as the Prince of Berar told Somerset Maugham, didn't admit dogs or Indians whereas Bombay's Royal Yacht Club excluded only Indians. It is unnecessary to nurse any grievance on that score. A club is a place 'where a man goes to be among his own kind', says Lejeune. George Orwell's observation that the British established clubs in every Indian town left unsaid that it was to get away from India. Therefore, Indians who take pride in the Bengal's past are like Kipling's bandar-log cavorting in the abandoned city. Discerning men like Sir Padam Ginwala who passed the Lejeune test before independence would not join the Bengal when political and economic circumstance (and a lecture from Prince Philip) forced it to lift its colour bar. Grandees like Sir Jyotsna Ghosal, Sir Biren Mookerjee and the Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan made more use of the Calcutta Club, established with official benediction to bridge the racial divide. But the Bengal's present and future are ours to reshape, never forgetting that a club is by definition both English and a bastion of privilege. Make it desi, let democracy run amok, and you are left with a restaurant, library, bridge and billiards room, but not a club. Gladstone, who vowed to back 'the masses against the classes' the world over and yet declared himself 'an out-and-out inegalitarian' because the aristocratic principle meant the rule of the best, looms over London's National Liberal - my second club, Calcutta was the first - in 36 portraits and statues. They included a painting of Gladstone's cabinet from which Charles Dilke was painted out after being cited as a co-respondent. Mr Peters, the head porter, pointed it out to me, manfully concealing his disappointment that I was no connection of B.N. Dutta Roy, a veteran member who attended the Round Table conference with Sir Nripendranath Sircar, and whose son Amitava was last heard of in Brazil. Another Indian link came to light when I invited Shanti Swarup Dhawan, our high commissioner, to lunch. Annoyed that his secretary should telephone to vet the venue, I asked if the National Liberal was good enough. 'Very fine, Sir CP died there!' exclaimed the old India House hand, referring to C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar, the 'dewan of unbalanced ambition and vanity' who declared Travancore independent. Another story concerns F.E. Smith who used the National Liberal's vast tiled lavatory every day on his way to Westminster. Gently informed by Mr Peters's predecessor that he should be a member, the future Lord Birkenhead snapped, 'You mean this is a club too?' Porters are a superior breed. My son and I were stranded once at the Travellers Club when Alexander emerged from the porters lodge, called his peers at other clubs and found us rooms at the Athenaeum whose secretary had told the Travellers secretary only minutes before that they were full. No slipped fiver either. I am glad Amiya Gooptu, the Bengal's current president, remembered the staff - ultimate guardians of graciousness - amidst the junketings. They alone remember lost heirlooms like the battered reception desk with a small brass plate saying a local regiment (the Calcutta Light Horse?) had given it to Lord Kitchener; the framed 19th century map of Calcutta, the gift of a long-departed British member, with the club marked with a bold star, that hung in the library; or the photograph of the Prince of Wales with his ostrich plumes and Ich Dien (I Serve) motto that adorned a suite named after him. They disappeared during redecoration in the mid-Nineties. Earlier, the Calcutta Club lost its brass writing set, ornate Burmese dinner gong and the entwined double C menu holders in hallmarked silver that were put out in the hall every day. The Ootacamund Club sparkles with silver and the Bangalore Club prominently displays Churchill's portrait with his unpaid bill for a few rupees and the committee resolution writing it off. Here, even Raj Bhavan has been denuded of its treasures. Perhaps Calcutta carries a stylish preference for silver over plastic to the extreme of literally interpreting Lejeune's other exhortation to treat the club like home. Shakespeare's Henry V claimed to love France so much that he would not part with a single French village! Paul Theroux describes the desolation of Lahore's Punjab Club. When my son was a Haileybury sixth former, the East India Club in St James's Square (incorporating the Devonshire, Sports and Public Schools) tempted boys with an irresistibly attractive package. But India has internalized clubs, as it has high courts, legislatures, the communist parties and other relics of the raj. Pressure will grow as more people move south of Park Street, send their children to English-medium schools and seek all the symbols of status. Many may even have to emulate the Delhi Gymkhana's innovative Green Cards for the grown-up children of members. Club life is booming. But the boom is of the dhak and dhol, not the bugle and bagpipe. There might even be ironic justice in this metamorphosis. 'We now use the word clubbe,' wrote a 17th century Londoner, 'for a sodality in a tavern.' The adda soon shifted to the coffee houses - where else? - that women petitioned against and Charles II tried unsuccessfully to suppress. Gaming, gossip, literature, scandal, politics and conspiracy were thus the mainstay of London's original clubs. One might argue, therefore, that the cheerful raucousness of Indian clubs, the canvassing, fierce electoral battles and lawsuits, so far removed from the leather-upholstered serenity of Boodle's or the Reform, represent a return to roots. The splendid sodality - fellowship - of the Bengal's birthday bash even suggests that Malcolm Muggeridge's famous comment about 'the only Englishmen left in the world' should be narrowed down to Calcutta. India's oldest club remains its most convivial.