Clubs are also repositories of history. Take the Freemasons’ Club which has been in existence for over 3000 years and the ‘Medici club’, that later became a crime syndicate in medieval France. In more recent crimes Dawn Cub was started in the 1930s with Rai Bahadur Mithan Lal, Dr Murhari Lal and Hakim Abdus Samad being its founding fathers. They were morning worshippers –– winter and summer. Like it Dhub Dhub Club too is no more, but the Bengali Club, started at Kashmere Gate in 1925, has now got a new lease of life after its renovation. Five years ago a part of the building collapsed and the club had to stop holding its cultural programmes.
Many representations were made to the authorities, but nothing much was achieved despite the herculean efforts of Lt-Governor Tejinder Khanna and S.P. Mitra. Then INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) took up the cause of the club, with the convener of its Delhi Chapter, AGK Menon taking a special interest in the matter. The Bengali Club has a library, the Bangiya Sahitya Sabha, which was started in 1894 and later merged with it. Pictures of Durga Mata, Rabindranath Tagore, and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose are among those that adorn the walls of the club with its Spartan chairs and a round table on which club games like cards are played when managing committee members are not sitting at it to hold discussions.
It’s worth noting that the club was associated with the initial Durga Pujas which were actually held in Ballimaran and Fatehpuri. When Rabindranath Tagore visited Delhi in the first decades of the 19th Century, his play “Balmiki Pratibha” was staged by the club in Qudsia Garden. The poet was greatly impressed by the performance. Subhas Chandra Bose came to the club in 1935 during Durga Puja. Other VIPs included Pandit Ravi Shankar, Shambhu Mitra, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Kundan Lal Saigal, Salil Chowdhury and Hemant Kumar. One remembers Nirad C.Chaudhuri, who lived in Mori Gate, not far from the club, usually walked to it after spending part of the evening at Maidens Hotel. During one of the plays organized by the club the amused wife of the British Commissioner of Delhi asked Chaudhuri why the young actors were draped in bed sheets. This amused the great writer too. He told the lady that the actors were actually clad in dhotis and kurtas, which was the usual dress of Bengalis and that they had not just walked in half-dazed from their bedrooms in haste, covering themselves with sheets.
Hemant Kumar, who belonged to the Saigal school of singers, with his deep, languorous voice, sang some Bengali songs and also those rendered by him in Bollywood films. Among the listeners was an English professor from St. Stephen’s College (whose playground occupied the space behind Kashmere Gate now taken up by ISBT). The professor, who had come from London only recently, told a friend that he had never heard a voice that seemed to be so intoxicatingly whisky-sodden in his life and though he could not understand the words (“Tum Pukar Lo, Tumhara Intezar Hai”) he could guess their meaning as being an expression of deep, pensive love in the heart of a lover for his beloved. Mrs Margaret Chatterjee, another Briton who taught English at Miranda House and also served as part-time music critic of The Statesman, was among those who never missed an occasional visit to the club in the company of her husband.
Sumanta Banerjee, who was special correspondent of a Delhi newspaper and later wrote his memorable book on the Naxalite movement, sometimes went to the Bengali Club from Daryaganj, where he lived with his petite wife, Bizhet Husain in a flat bang opposite Golcha Cinema, Sumanta came back with a whole lot of anecdotes, along with the one about the man who mistook him for Sir Biren Mukherjee’s nephew. Sir Biren and Lady Biren were big names then. Babli Mitra Shaw, who later became principal of Indraprastha Women’s College, was quite nostalgic about her younger days spent in Mori Gate and her memories of the club to which her father, Dr Mitra was a frequent visitor.
The Bengali Club is an institution that drew the cream of Bengali society, not only from Delhi but also other cities like Agra, Allahabad, Benaras, Bombay and Calcutta. The Bagchi family of Agra did not miss a visit to the club while in Delhi, so also Dr P. K. Haldar, whose daughter Ruby married B. P. Bagchi, who unfortunately died last month on April 5, just two days before his 85th birthday, in Kolkata. Finally a word of praise would not be out of place for Som Prakash Mitra, an old resident of Kashmere Gate who presided over the club for more than six years in an unprecedented tenure that ended only yesterday (May 29). Had it not been for him perhaps the struggle to keep the Bengali Club going would not have been successfully waged, although litigation with the landlord of the heritage building is still to come to an amicable settlement.
The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi
