if these walls could talk
drinking in history at london's india club
This post is a collaboration between no more mangoes and the Brown History Newsletter.
On a particularly busy stretch of London’s Strand, tucked away between a shabby newsagent and an expensive-looking coffee shop, a nondescript doorway opens out onto the bustling sidewalk. It’s the kind of place that you could walk past a thousand times without ever realizing it’s there—there is very little to make it stand out in any way, save for the slightly weathered sign reading “HOTEL STRAND CONTINENTAL” that hangs above the door, and even that is easy to overlook amid the dizzying perpetual motion of the London street.
There is no lobby when you enter the doorway—just a flight of narrow, uneven stairs. Follow them up to a small landing, where straight ahead you will find the hotel’s check-in counter, itself fairly unremarkable other than that it looks like it could have fallen out of a 1950s photo album. Turn right through the double glass doors, however, and you will find a short hallway leading you in to an airy lounge, where stained-glass windows and walls painted soothing shades of cream and sage welcome you to the India Club.
To step through the India Club’s glass-paneled doors is to step back nearly three-quarters of a century into the past, when the Club’s namesake was still a fledgling nation, only just beginning to take its first steps into a brave new world. The space appears to have remained virtually unchanged since its establishment following Indian independence and the end of British rule, and indeed, the faded grandeur of that dying empire’s final days still lingers in the air like a vanishing cloud of smoke. The India Club is far from ostentatious—the paint on the walls is chipped, the wood molding scratched, the furniture simple and even cheap—and yet the place is nevertheless permeated by an air of historical elegance. Indian artworks and framed portraits of freedom fighters line the walls, and the windows which look out onto the busy street below are lofty and commanding, adorned at the top with stained glass panels.
Often, when I come here in the afternoons to write, the lounge is entirely deserted—even the area behind the counter is empty. In the evenings, however, the place fills up quickly and without warning as the dinner crowd from the restaurant upstairs—a simple, no-nonsense curry house, with walls painted pale yellow and row after row of rickety formica tables—spills into the lounge below. It is the kind of establishment where the vast majority of patrons are longtime regulars, and in the evenings the walls reverberate with the same heady cocktail of voices, laughter, and clinking glasses that have filled the space for more than 75 years.
If these walls could talk, they would likely speak with the same aristocratic, English-inflected accents as the whisky-swilling, London-educated Indian elites who first inaugurated them. The Club was established in 1951 as a social hub for Indian intellectuals, nationalists, and activists in the run-up to Indian independence, and its founding members included Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and V.K. Krishna Menon, the first Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. It served as the primary headquarters and meeting place for the India League, a prominent anticolonial organization founded by Menon in 1928 whose membership, in addition to Menon and Nehru, included leading intellectuals Bertrand Russell and Harold Laski, author H.G. Wells, and Labour Party leader Michael Foot, among other luminaries. In the years following Indian independence, the India League shifted its focus to promoting UK-India ties and the interests of Indians living in Britain, and the India Club quickly became a gathering place for London’s South Asian community. In 1964, the Club moved from its original premises at 41 Craven Street to its current location at 143 The Strand—though by all accounts, the India League had already been conducting much of its business at the Strand site for several years before the move.
Over the years, the India Club housed the meetings and activities of groups including the Indian Journalists’ Association, the Indian Workers’ Association, and the Indian Socialist Group of Britain. In addition to these formal associations, however, the Club also served a vital function as a “home away from home” for countless individual South Asians who immigrated to England over the years—in 2019, the British National Trust held an exhibition on the Club’s history and cultural significance, which included a series of video interviews and oral histories from longtime Club patrons. One such testimony comes from Kusoom Vadgama, a writer and doctor who first came to London from Kenya in 1953 and who began frequenting the India Club on a regular basis in the 1960s. The Club, she explains in her interview, is the essence of “India in Britain—literally, physically, and spiritually.”
All the historic and cultural significance in the world, however, has not been enough to inoculate the India Club against the looming threat posed by the forces of redevelopment and so-called “urban renewal.” In 1997, facing liquidation, the establishment was bought by by a Parsi couple named Yadgar and Freny Marker. (The Club has remained in the Marker family’s hands ever since, and their daughter Phiroza now serves as general manager.) For several years after the Markers took over, the India Club’s future seemed relatively secure, but this certainty was upended in September 2017, when the building’s landlord—Fulham-based Marston Properties—submitted plans to the Westminster Council to shutter the India Club and redevelop the site, with its coveted central location, into an upscale hotel complex.
The plans were met with widespread community outrage, and a petition opposing the planning application received more than 26,000 signatures. The public comments accompanying the petition’s signatures reflect the Club’s historic importance to London’s South Asian community—many comments highlight longstanding familial connections to the India Club, including parents and grandparents who were regular patrons in the 1950s and 1960s, while others emphasize the establishment’s unique significance as both a symbol and a site of history. As one commenter eloquently observed:
“This is a living monument to Britain’s imperial history that is also integral to the liberation movements Britain has inspired. There are few symbols that capture the complexity of Britain’s colonial past; India Club is deserving of protection and celebration.”
Nearly one year after the planning application was submitted, the Westminster Council voted unanimously in August 2018 to reject it—as Tony Devenish, chairman of the Council’s planning applications subcommittee, explained, the proposed redevelopment would mean “the potential loss of an important cultural venue located on its site, the India Club. The India Club has a special place in the history of our Indian community and it is right that we protect it from demolition.”
This victory, however, proved short-lived. In the wake of the devastation wrought on the hospitality sector across the United Kingdom by the COVID pandemic, Marston Properties served the India Club with an eviction notice in early 2021, notifying the Markers of the landlord’s intention to proceed with the planned hotel redevelopment. After a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the Club’s legal defense shattered its initial target in just a few weeks and raised over £50,000 in less than three months, the establishment reopened in May 2021 in defiance of the eviction order. At the time of writing, the eviction case is still working its way through the courts. For now, however, the India Club is still standing, doing exactly what it has done best for the last 60 years, serving the same comfort food and fostering the same sense of community under the same historic roof.
The fight to save the India Club is just one battlefield in a much larger war against the rising tide of so-called “regeneration” efforts that have, in recent years, threatened to displace and erase communities across London with rich and often underappreciated histories. As a city, London is no stranger to gentrification—in fact, the term itself was first used by the German-born sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the phenomenon of affluent Londoners moving into previously working-class areas in the 1960s. Most discussion of gentrification—whether in London or any other city—tends, for good reason, to focus on the human costs of such changes, from displacement to overpolicing. In addition to these costs, however, this phenomenon often also has the less tangible but no less devastating effect of erasing (in many cases, literally bulldozing) the historic and cultural institutions that have long served as pillars of immigrant and working-class communities. This is a pattern that has repeated itself over and over again across London in recent years, from the attempted eviction of a beloved multicultural grocery store in Brixton Market to the ongoing campaign to save Brick Lane, the historic heart of East London’s Bangladeshi community, from corporate redevelopment.
Arguably, however, the India Club’s significance extends beyond the immediate local politics of gentrification and urban renewal. In many ways, it speaks to broader, far more fundamental questions of what spaces like this one, with their rich history and longstanding importance for immigrant communities, really mean given the historic and current context of immigration in the United Kingdom.
The history of immigration to Britain is inextricably intertwined with the history and ongoing legacies of the British Empire. As Ian Sanjay Patel, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Research at Birkbeck University of London, writes in the introduction to his 2021 book We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire, “only by retelling the story of immigration, not as a domestic national story confined to the British Isles but as a diverse international story connected to empire, can we begin to see it clearly.” In the wake of the Second World War, with its grip on the colonies loosening and a growing sense that the global winds of change were starting to blow in the direction of decolonization, Britain began to shift its attention toward the Commonwealth, which included current and former colonies alike, as a means of keeping the imperial project alive in a new, adapted form. In a “conscious attempt to keep Britain’s post-war imperial ambitious intact,” Patel explains, the British government held on to a uniform conception of British nationality that encompassed all Commonwealth subjects—an effort which “had the effect of granting British citizenship, and confirming the right of entry into Britain, to millions of nonwhite people in the post-war world. In other words,” writes Patel, “the constitutional unification of Britain with the empire and Commonwealth, and the post-war migrations to Britain that followed it, were intended and unintended consequences of a single post-war imperial project.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, realizing the implications of this expansive approach to citizenship, the British government began to pass a series of increasingly draconian laws aimed at reining in the parameters of nationality and severely restricting immigration—policies which had the effect, as legal scholar Nadine El-Enany has argued, of “[placing] the wealth of Britain, gained via colonial conquest, out of reach for the vast majority of people racialised through colonial processes.” This push to close Britain’s borders to its former colonial subjects was, of course, spurred on in large part by the racist fearmongering of right-wing politicians such as Enoch Powell, whose infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech painted an apocalyptic picture of a Britain overrun by non-white immigration, where “in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
This, then, is the context in which the India Club’s history has unfolded (and continues to do so). As South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom from the 1950s onward found themselves faced with the harsh realities of an erstwhile colonizer that had initially welcomed them to its shores, only to turn hostile, spaces like the India Club played a pivotal role—as the aforementioned thousands of testimonies and petition comments indicate—in providing them with a gathering place and a crucial sense of community. Today, as the British government—even with an Indian prime minister whose ascent to power has been misguidedly hailed as a victory for South Asian representation—pursues an immigration policy whose defining features are its overt hostility and abject cruelty, the need to defend and preserve institutions like the India Club is arguably more urgent than ever before. In the absence of such institutions, the violent politics of anti-immigrant erasure that is increasingly being promoted by the British state—erasing not only immigrants’ physical presence in this country, but the vestiges of their history as well—will only be accelerated.
In the India Club’s lounge, underneath a massive plaque listing the names of every president of the “Curry Club” from 1962 to 2023 in shining golden letters, a large, slightly weathered guestbook rests on a wooden stand. Its wrinkled pages are covered in messages left by patrons, ranging in tone from the heartfelt to the irreverent. Of the countless notes that fill the pages of this guestbook, however, there is one in particular—from March of last year—that catches my eye, encapsulating with poignant simplicity the core of what the India Club means to so many people:
“This is more than a beautiful and unique place — THIS IS LONDON. All the great spirits of our city and shared past are here. I’ll defend it to the death, and I hope you will too.”
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absolutely gorgeous!
What a beautiful read, thank you so much for sharing.