For more than a century, the Delhi Gymkhana Club has sat on 27.3 acres of prime Safdarjung Road land, outlasting empire, Independence, Partition, shifting politics and repeated internal battles. It has been a club, certainly – with tennis courts, a ballroom, billiards tables, squash courts, a swimming pool, gravel paths and sprawling lawns. But it has also been a map of power in the capital.
Behind its white colonial facades and guarded gates, former presidents, generals, judges, diplomats, bureaucrats, ministers, industrialists and their families mingled in a world that was intimate, discreet, and, according to some, deeply hierarchical.