Known and unknown

INDEPENDENCE SPECIAL/ EXECUTIVE LIFESTYLE

The playing fields
The demands of a competitive market and new businesses today have flattened hierarchies like never before. But in the days before liberalisation when licensing kept corporate competition to a minimum, hierarchies were rigidly followed.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Kolkata's social life where the clerical staff was actively discouraged from playing in corporate sports tournaments that were reserved exclusively for executives.

Indeed, companies found fielding sides with clerical staff, who were often professional sportsmen, were disqualified from these "Merchant's Cup" competitions.

Boxwallahs & Brown Sahibs
According to Hobson Jobson, the dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, "boxwallah" was a hybrid term "" literally bakas- (i.e. box) wala "" that referred to a native itinerant pedlar who sold cutlery, cheap nick-nacks, and small wares of all kinds, chiefly European.

In former days, he was a welcome visitor to small stations and solitary bungalows. Later, the term came to be used "" a little disparagingly "" for executives who worked in the early British trading companies.

Thus "boxwallah" culture referred to the social life that revolved around these companies. But executives of corporations that evolved as the giant managing agencies were better known as Brown Sahibs, though the terms were often interchangeable

No Indians, please
Club life was the epicenter of executive social life in Kolkata, both before and after independence. The city lost its pre-eminence as the corporate capital of India and arbiter of high society only by the late seventies.

But club life was also rigidly governed. So, Bengal Club started in 1827 but excluded Indian membership. A counter to this came only in 1907 in the form of Calcutta Club, which allowed membership to both expatriates and Indians.

Remarkably, Bengal Club admitted Indian members only in 1959, more than a decade after independence.

Men only
As Russi Mody says, women played a role in corporate life mostly in the social context in the old days. Outside of advertising, there were few women executives till the mid-eighties. This was true even in the clubs.

In Calcutta Club, for instance, women were allowed only on Wednesdays and, that too, in the annexe rather than the main building. Later only widows of members who had passed on were eligible for membership.

All this changed over the eighties but not without a struggle. The Calcutta Football and Cricket Club, the world's oldest cricket club, opened its doors to women members only in the nineties.