The social clubs of British India have had a bad press. The Chandrapore Club in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and the Kyauktada Club in George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934) remain indelible symbols of all that was and is off-putting about colonial society: the endless drinking, bridge playing, and gossip; the intellectual aridity signified by amateur theatricals and yellowing copies of Punch; and, above all, the smug sense of racial privilege upheld by exclusionary membership policies and the casual abuse of indigenous servants. If segregation was an increasingly inescapable fact of life in the Raj after 1857, no institution seems to have embodied the retreat to the civil lines more fully than the insular, provincial, whites-only club.

With In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia, Benjamin B. Cohen challenges this narrative. As few as 4 percent of British clubs in colonial South Asia, he finds, maintained formal policies of racial exclusion; while some may have accomplished the same end through informal means, most did not. In the Union Club of Calcutta, the Cosmopolitan Club of Madras, and others like them, Indian Civil Service officials, military officers, and tea planters rubbed shoulders with Indian rajahs, professionals, and businessmen. Far from constituting a racial refuge, Cohen argues, the clubland of the Raj was a corner of the public sphere accessible—albeit on uneven and shifting terms—to colonizer and colonized alike. In refining and renegotiating those terms over time, clubs gave shape to an “associational life” of civility and sociability that, in some cases, aimed explicitly at encouraging friendly relations between Britons and Indians. Even as Cohen traces the origins of club culture back to Pall Mall and St. James's Street—and even as his argument echoes claims made by other historians for the fabled coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London—he stresses that colonial clubland was not simply transplanted from the metropole. Like the dining-room menus that listed mulligatawny soup along with beefsteak and Stilton, the clubs themselves were hybrid products, shaped by their immediate environment as well as the distant world of elite British society.

In India, as in Britain, the club was a creation of the nineteenth century, and the years between 1870 and 1900 were boom years for the establishment of new ones on the subcontinent. Cohen devotes the bulk of In the Club to chronicling how these institutions worked: in the rules and bylaws governing membership, fees, and elections; in the mechanics of budgeting, bookkeeping, and the procurement of goods from port wine to billiard balls; in the functions assigned to particular spaces, like the library, and to particular workers, like the hall porter; and in the code of expectations, written and unwritten, that structured the behavior of club members from the playing field to the banquet table to the ballroom. The weight of institutions and norms matters to Cohen's argument because it allows him to present clubland as a microcosm of “civil society”: a place where authority was bound by rules, where majoritarian votes determined policies, and where disputes were kept within limits by the bonds of community. While Cohen acknowledges that barriers of wealth, status, race, and gender kept the overwhelming majority of Indians from ever crossing the threshold of a clubhouse, he nonetheless argues that clubs “served the valuable purpose of teaching skills and instilling civic practices” needed for “democratic institutions” (43).

Perhaps the best evidence for this claim is the proliferation of clubs founded by and for subaltern groups who were excluded from the redoubts of white masculinity. The Parsi elite of Bombay congregated in the Ripon Club; the Sinhalese community of Ceylon had the Orient Club; the Nilgiri Ladies’ Club brought together the wives of prominent men, both British and Indian, in the hill station of Ootacamund. Some of the hidebound imperialist clubs changed over time, too, with the prestigious patronage of Indian princes and the occasional Indian guest of honor functioning as a leading edge for integration. Like other historians of the public sphere, Cohen hints that practices of civility and sociability had a cascading logic that gradually eroded barriers and forged connections in unexpected ways.

And yet, even when clubland opened up in some ways, it remained segregated and elitist in others. Is this what Cohen means by “a colonial civil society” or “a colonial form of civility”? Precisely because the possibilities are so intriguing, one longs for a clearer definition of terms; the passing references to Jürgen Habermas, Robert Putnam, and network theory do not really suffice to make interpretive sense of the exhaustive detail on club operations. There are grounds, too, for questioning the portrait of clubs as associational utopias. Because the source base consists largely of rulebooks, charters, and other bureaucratic documents, clubs in this account risk appearing more orderly than they really were. One lesson we might draw from Forster and Orwell is that petty scandals, seamy intrigues, and savage controversies often lurk beneath the surface of imperial hierarchies—even if, as Cohen successfully shows, the clubland portraits of those literary observers deserve to be seen as caricature rather than fact.