For decades, the Indian elite have sought escape in Raj-era private clubs and gymkhanas, scattered around the swankiest neighbourhoods in the country's big cities, hillside resorts and cantonment towns.

Access to these quintessentially "English" enclaves, with their bellboys, butlers, dark mahogany interiors and rigid dress codes, has been reserved for the privileged; the old moneyed who roam the corridors of power - think business tycoons, senior bureaucrats, erstwhile royals, politicians or officers of the armed forces.

This is where India's rich and powerful have hobnobbed for years, building social capital over cigars or squash and brokering business deals during golf sessions. Today, these spaces can feel strangely anachronistic - relics of a bygone era in a country eager to shed its colonial past.

As Asia's third largest economy breeds a new generation of wealth creators, a more modern and less formal avatar of the private members-only club - that reflects the sweeping economic and demographic changes under way in India - is emerging. This is where the newly well-heeled are hanging out and doing business.

Demand for such spaces is strong enough for the international chain Soho House to plan two new launches in the capital Delhi and in south Mumbai in the coming months. Their first offering - an ocean-facing club on Mumbai's iconic Juhu Beach - opened six years ago and is wildly successful.

The chain is one of a host of new club entrants vying to cater to a market that is booming in India.

Soho House started in London in the mid-90s as an antidote to the upscale gentlemen's clubs that lined Pall Mall. It came in as a refreshingly new concept: a more relaxed club for creators, thinkers and creative entrepreneurs, who might have felt like they didn't belong in the enclaves of the old aristocracy.

Thirty years later, India's flourishing tech-driven economy of start-ups and........

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