Tucked away on a street side in the busy Bhadra area in the heart of old Ahmedabad is Gujarat Club. Established in 1888, Gujarat’s oldest club was once the “rendezvous of Ahmedabad’s fashionable society to play bridge”. Today the glamour is gone, with only about half a dozen regular bridge players. A plaque on its wall informs two famous barristers Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel met for the first time here in a milestone moment for the club. More on that meeting later. Sharing its wall with the Ahmedabad city civil and sessions court, the grade II/A heritage structure, a building of local importance which contributes to the image and identity of the region, the club serves as a quick meeting point for lawyers between breaks and a spot for evening snacks post end of the court sessions for the day. On weekends, for some, like practising advocate and club secretary Gaurang Patel, it provides a spot to catch up over multiple games of bridge. Taking a break from his game, Patel rues, “Now there are hardly five or six regular bridge players who come to the club. As it is, there is a dearth of bridge players in Ahmedabad.” As per Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) records, the club, one of Ahmedabad’s first with indoor game facilities, was established by Rao Bahadur Nagarji Desai, a government high school teacher, in the walled city. In 1905, 17 years later, it was shifted to its current building near Bhadra Fort. Chimanlal Thakore gave a facelift to the club back then. As per the club records, some past presidents included erstwhile industrialists and mill owners Ambalal Sarabhai, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Amratlal Hargovindas, and more recently, senior advocate Sudhir Nanavati. The Gujarat Club’s records state it was initially housed at Panvala’s Haveli, popularly known as Sidi Sahab’s Haveli, in Pankore Naka, in the middle of the walled city, surrounded by offices and courts. In Rao Bahadur Nagarji Desai’s own words, as documented by the club on its golden jubilee year, the choice of the haveli was a “fortunate fluke”, for the club owed its success mainly to the “convenient central place.” “There was very little in favour of this building, except its central situation.People who felt fagged at the end of the day with their office work found it very convenient and took it as a refreshing ground and became members. Some who had to deal with the main market came to it as by-the-bye business.The constant presence of pioneers induced others to join and the numbers on the roll rapidly began to increase,” records Nagarji, who ultimately left Ahmedabad in 1892, adding that fees were purposely kept low to attract members. Initial admission fee of Rs 3 “Initially the members were few and the fees low - Rs 3 for admission and Rs 1 as monthly fee. It had a mud-covered tennis court and hired furniture. Hence for the funds, the club sought the sympathy of the rich and famous of Ahmedabad and the princes and patrons of Gujarat and Saurashtra. From them, it immediately received immense response,” the club’s records document in an article published in a centenary souvenir in 1996, written by the celebrated poet Prof Niranjan Bhagat. In 1996, the club had around 900 members and now 800 members, according to treasurer of the club and advocate Umedsingh Shekhavat. “The club used to see active membership, but after the Gujarat High Court shifted from off the Ashram road to Sola, the number of lawyers and judges who used to visit the club has come down owing to the distance,” says a member. To secure the patronage of the then elite, Nagarji notes they tried an “honest and innocent trick to increase our funds.” “At the evening parties given in honour of our illustrious guests, we purposely invited the elite of the Ahmedabad Society who had remained outside the club and had not become members. After attending one or more evening parties, they thought it fair to grace the club as members. This way, the club grew as time passed,” says Nagarji’s account. The Gandhi-Patel meeting However, the club’s crowning glory was becoming the place the two freedom struggle stalwarts Sardar Patel and Gandhi met for the first time in 1916. A 1970 biography of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by journalist D V Tahmankar opens the first chapter with: “On a June afternoon in 1916, four men played bridge in the Gujarat Club while the pankha boys lazily pulled the levers to keep the room cool. One of the card players, a barrister (Patel), was in winning form and in high spirits when the boy brought in tea. At that moment, someone dashed into the room to invite the players to meet Mr Gandhi and hear the lecture he was giving that evening.” At one point, the book also notes that in the evenings, Patel would go to Gujarat Club, It notes that one of Patel’s sources of enjoyment in life was playing bridge at the club. When, in a radical move, Patel took to sweeping the streets one day after being elected Ahmedabad municipal president in 1924, starting from the “Harijan quarter”, purportedly an act that defied the high society he belonged to, “there were murmurs and criticism in the fashionable Gujarat Club; some orthodox members thought of excommunicating him”. While playing bridge pulled Patel to the club every evening, Gandhi, as the book describes, “cut an odd figure among club members who rather prided themselves on their fashionable clothes and elegance”. Gandhi frequented the club to address small gatherings there following his return from South Africa to settle in Ahmedabad. Patel’s rising stature as a barrister and increasing influence at the Bar by 1917 meant daily contact with wealthy businessmen, mill owners and social workers in the Gujarat Club, “which was fast growing into a quasi-political institution”. Shekhavat adds that the club has had members across the political spectrum. “All differences are laid to rest at the gate and political affiliations do not matter once you enter the club premises.” Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, in his book Day-to-day with Gandhi: Secretary's Diary, Volume 2, published in 1968, describes Gujarat Club as a “lawyers’ private club”. Giving a glimpse into the importance of a Gujarat Club membership in its heydays, The All Indian Reporter 1939 Bombay Section also records an interesting court litigation involving a police official’s cancellation of his Gujarat Club membership. In May 1930, a raid was planned by some members of the Congress, in pursuance of its policy of non-co-operation and civil disobedience during Dandi march. Phiroz Antia, then Deputy Superintendent of Police in Gujarat, was removed as a club member in July 1930, without being given any reasons. Antia went to court, and ultimately at the second appeal stage, the court held that the club, which was then being presided over by Ambalal Sarabhai, had wronged Antia. The court noted that the “action on the part of the members of the Gujarat Club offended against the elementary principles of natural justice and reason”. The court explained that Antia’s expulsion was “the result of the mental coordination of the facts as he imagined them, one of them being the natural antipathy towards a policeman who was opposed to persons who were avowedly breaking the law”. Ruling in Antia’s favour, the court directed, “That the Gujarat Club, Ahmedabad, and its managing committee and their servants be restrained from excluding the plaintiff from the club premises or preventing him from the use thereof or from exercising all his rights and privileges of membership.” Shekhawat, who joined the club in around 1980, says that at the time, the admission fee was around Rs 1,000, and the yearly membership fee was another Rs 1,000. This now stands at an admission fee of Rs 6,000 and an annual fee of Rs 1,500. A lifetime membership now costs around Rs 25,000. Before Independence, the club was dominated by mill owners and lawyers as its members. Over the years, councillors, MLAs, and sportspersons, too, have been inducted. Officially, club membership requires one to be a graduate at the least or must have excelled in sports. Some of its past members are Congress MPs Haroobhai Mehta and Ahsan Jafri, who was killed in the 2002 Gulbarg Society massacre, and billiards champion Satish Mohan. Today, the club houses several popular card rooms, table tennis, billiards and a tennis court, which serves as parking space. While the club building is marked as a heritage building, it stands on Gujarat government-owned land, taken on a long-term lease. The club has been attempting to rope in the AMC to help in the maintenance.
