15/1/2018
PUNE: Poona Club is spread out in the city- its golf course is
at a sprawling Yerawada plot, its squash courts and swimming pools are just
beside the Rajendra Sinhji Institute in the stately Queen's Garden, and its
main club house is at quaint Bund Garden premise, the area being much larger
than it looks externally.
And it is still one of the oldest areas of exclusivity in the
city, where members congregate over the weekends and socialize over a game of
tennis, and where first-class Ranji Trophy games still continue to be hosted.
It has been so since the early 1930s. But what has been lost over the years has
been much of the original architecture of the clubhouse, including most of the
records that it had, which had the master plan of the Bund Garden structure.
As far as the history books go, The Poona Club did not exist
in its name until the 1930s. It became the Poona Gymkhana Club in 1880, and
since the 1860s, the Bund Garden premises were known as the Edward Garden,
named after the erstwhile Prince of Wales of the United Kingdom, the heir
to the throne.
And pre-1890s, the clubhouse was part of the Cantonment limits, till a
delimitation exercise by the Bombay Presidency removed it from the Cantonment
and placed it under the new Poona Municipality. The squash court remains in the
Cantonment, though, and a swimming pool has been added there over the years.
As a civilian club, 1882 was a pivotal year, when a group of
nobles- British and Indians, civil servants, business tycoons, and other-
managed to get the government to have the premises leased to them. The lease
rent- about thirteen rupees per year- was not really a setback, as almost every
top British official in the Presidency was a member here.
So were the Indians, albeit only the rich and mighty, in what
was probably one of the earliest interaction of the equals between the colonial
masters and the colonized. From the future Tata scion Sir Dorab Tata, the
Maharajas of Baroda and Saurashtra, and members of the Sassoon family too.
Disaster struck at the famed club in August 1945, as the
entire clubhouse was gutted in an inferno, helped along by the fact that the
structure was predominantly a wooden one. Old documents, related to
memberships, chronicles, leases, and even the original building plan, were lost
forever.
The club recovered. A new stone structure was built--clearly, lessons were taken from the fire. The new clubhouse was opened in 1953 by future prime minister Morarji Desai, who happened to be the chief minister of Bombay when it was established.
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