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New Delhi: They are fast disappearing – one Gymkhana Club, one race course and one polo ground at a time, each a lingering relic of the Raj. And, with them is passing an entire generation, now well into their seventies, eighties and beyond, who remain the last living custodians of the rituals, hierarchies and unwritten social codes that once defined that world. 

Born in the twilight of Empire, or in the early decades after Independence, many of this much-romanticised generation of “Midnight’s children” were among the last regular fixtures at the 113-year-old Gymkhana Club, the adjoining Jaipur Polo Grounds, founded in 1930, and the contiguous Delhi Race Club, established four years earlier.

Educated in elite boarding schools across India, Oxbridge colleges, the Inns of Court, military academies, prestigious universities and civil-service institutions, they imbibed colonial educational and administrative culture that survived long after the Union Jack had been lowered in August 1947. Their worldly outlook was shaped primarily by an inheritance that was as much cultural as it was institutional.

Also read: Biting a Club Sandwich in Chappals: Different Footwear, Same Gymkhana Door

For this privileged class, the Raj never entirely departed; it simply changed flags.

Among them, tweeds with leather elbow patches and polished brogues lingered, regimental ties and cravats remained badges of belonging, tea was still served at four, sundowners of Scotch-and-soda or a G&T (gin and tonic) were de rigueur, and lawns were clipped with military precision, alongside countless other English customs and social rituals they had imbibed over successive generations.

But this was never merely a clubland phenomenon.

Its influence extended into the cantonments, courts, government offices and corporate establishments of independent India, where a distinct professional culture – marked by hierarchy, formality, precision and a certain inherited sense of propriety – continued to shape public life. The ubiquitous “box-wallah” became perhaps the most recognisable civilian expression of this legacy: the English-educated professional who openly flaunted the manners, habits and aspirations of the Raj.

From this colonial milieu emerged the social type that contemporaries and later critics derisively called the “brown Englishman” or, more bluntly, the “coconut” – brown on the outside and white within. The intellectual progenitor of this Raj archetype was Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British politician and colonial administrator whose 1835 Minute on Education laid the foundations of English education in India.

He sought – and succeeded beyond measure – in fashioning an English-educated governing class of Indians who were, in his oft-quoted words, “Indian in blood and colour, but........

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